(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Lindsey Burke on the lay of the land in the District of Columbia Public Schools, which inches ever closer to having a majority of charter school students and which is leading the nation by a wide margin in academic gains, led by charter schools. Oh and where district school principals have taken to the streets to sell their schools to parents in search of students.
What do you make of all of this Chewie?
Yeah, me too.
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charter schools | Tagged: Academic Performance of DC District and Charter Schools, charter schools, DCPS | 
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Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
When the National Center for Education Statistics first released the 2013 NAEP data, the website refused to cooperate with requests to give charter/district comparisons for the District of Columbia. This is of especially strong interest given that 43% of DC public school children attend charter schools.
Well lo and behold the NAEP website decided to start cooperating, and the data tells a pretty amazing story: district schools are improving over time in DC, but charters show even stronger growth.
NAEP takes new random samples of students in each testing year, but judges performance consistently across time. Making comparisons between district and charter students isn’t easy. The percentages of students in special programs for children with disabilities and English Language Learners can potentially impact average scores. So for instance if DC charter schools have fewer children with disabilities enrolled, or fewer ELL students, or fewer low-income children enrolled, they could appear to be doing a better job educating students when the truth could be quite different.
Fortunately NAEP allows us to take these factors into account. The charts below show NAEP data that gets as close to an “apples to apples” comparison as possible, comparing only the scores of Free and Reduced lunch eligible students in the general education program. Two other sources of bias that could be expected to work against charter schools involve new schools and newly transferred students. Organizations tend to not be at their best during their “shakedown cruise” and schools are no exception. Also students tend to take a temporary academic hit as they adjust to a new school after transferring. Charter schools tend to have lots of new schools full of kids who just transferred in-providing a double whammy when looking at any snapshot of performance.
Unfortunately, NAEP does not contain any tools for taking the age or the school or length of enrollment into account. Thus DC charter schools are fighting at a bit of disadvantage, and a very substantial funding disadvantage, in the below charts.
DC charters may be fighting with one hand tied behind their back, but it did not stop them from scoring a knockout on NAEP. DC charters widened their advantage in the percentage of children scoring “Basic or Better” from 4 points in 2011 to 9 points in 2013.
DC district students saw a large improvement in 8th grade reading between the 2011 and 2013 NAEP, but still found themselves trailing the achievement of DC charter students by 5%. In 4th Grade math, district students scored a very large gain, but charter students achieved an even larger improvement.
On 8th grade math, district students demonstrated impressive gains, but DC charter students were 19% more likely to score “Basic or Better.”
Hopefully the race to excellence will continue and even accelerate. Meep! Meep!
14 Comments | charter schools, NAEP | Tagged: Academic Performance of DC District and Charter Schools, DC Charter Schools, DC NAEP scores | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
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