G.I. earns one gold earring

by David Safier

This is a damning-with-faint-praise segment of my regular Fool's Gold series looking at the inaccuracies the Goldwater Institute trades in. This time, the information isn't incorrect. It's just half of the story. So one gold earring out of two seems appropriate. Worn pirate-like. Also appropriate.

Last week Matthew Ladner wrote one of G.I.'s daily emails. The subject was a study out of Stanford that concluded New York's charter schools outperformed the public schools, controlling for the student populations. It looks to be about as good a study as you're going to find, and its results appear to be accurate. I posted about the study a few weeks ago, adding two caveats. First, this study, like all studies about education, needs to be taken with generous grains of salt, though this one seems better than most. Second, the principal author is a big supporter of "school choice" (read, vouchers and charters) [note: slight correction of a poorly typed portion of the post] and the study was funded by the Center on School Choice and the Bush administration. The study may be perfectly objective, but it's always good to know if there might be reasons to watch out for bias.

So far so good.

But I don't remember Ladner ever seeing fit to mention another Stanford study that came out in June which presented charters as a mixed bag. It concluded that in 6 states, including Arizona, charter students scored a bit lower than similar students in traditional public schools and in 5 states charter students scored a bit higher.

Hmm. The first study looked at 11 states, not including New York, and made the quality of charters and traditional public schools look like a toss-up. Ignored by G.I. The second made NY's charter schools look great. Subject of a G.I. email. Makes you wonder about bias, don't it?

Now that the email is put in its proper context, some quotes are in order. Opening paragraph.

A new random assignment study on charter school achievement found significantly higher academic gains for students attending charter schools.

The sentence is true, but it would be far more accurate if 3 words were thrown in at the end of the sentence: "in New York." See, when I read the sentence as written, I get the impression charter schools in general score higher. Throw in those 3 words, and I realize we're talking about a single city.

New York is mentioned in the second paragraph. I'll give Ladner credit for not leaving it out entirely, like he left out the first Stanford study.

Following a quote from an article about the study in the Wall Street Journal, Ladner concludes,

In Arizona the rate of new charter school openings has stalled in recent years. Other states have raced ahead by allowing universities and cities to authorize charter schools. Arizona should follow the examples of these states and encourage charter schools that provide access to high-quality education for our most vulnerable students.

Where to begin? Until recently, Arizona had more charter schools per capita than any other state, and I believe that's still true. And according to the first Stanford study, Arizona's record on charters is nothing to crow about, so we shouldn't "race ahead" until we have a better system of authorizing new charters and exercising oversight of the existing ones. But Ladner wants the reader to think we're losing the charter school race to other states. ("We must not allow . . . a charter school gap!" — loose paraphrase of General "Buck" Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove.)

G.I.'s Ministry of Propaganda is alive and well. Wear your one gold earring proudly, Matthew. Argh!