by David Safier
It's nice to see the Republic confirm what I've written here frequently: If you don't cherry-pick your charter schools, their student achievement is more-or-less the same as district schools.
The occasion was a fact check of a statement made by Joe McCord, a governing board member of the Peoria Unified School District.
Joe McCord . . . said that despite a public perception of charter schools offering students a better education than traditional public schools, national studies say they actually perform about the same or worse.
The only quibble the Republic had with McCord was that his stats were off by a few points. The correct national stats are: 17% of charters have students with higher test scores than equivalent students at district schools, 37% score worse and 47% are about the same, based on a 2009 Stanford study. In Arizona, charter school students did a bit worse on achievement tests than similar district school students.
Though it wasn't part of the Republic's fact check, I'll add, private schools don't outperform district or charter schools. Ask Bush's Department of Ed, which came up with those findings twice, and scholars who have looked at achievement scores of voucher students in Milwaukee and D.C.
So why the blanket condemnation of district schools and the championing of charter schools and vouchers as our educational saviors? The answer: politics, politics, politics.
(h/t to Andrea Dalessandro for the link.)