Star charter school article kinda hits, kinda misses

by David Safier

A front page Sunday Star article is titled, Sunnyside, TUSD work to counter charters' lure. Decent headline, I have to mention, since my post below criticizes other Star headlines. Though the story talks about students going to private schools as well as charters, charters are the main focus.

Charter schools are pulling students from district schools, the article says. And districts are trying to respond. All true.

After that, though, the article goes a bit astray. The overriding sense of the article is, charters are generally superior to district schools, which had damn well better figure out a way to catch up or they're going to lose more and more students.

I'm not surprised reporters Carmen Duarte and Alexis Huicochea got that impression. Look who they talked to.

On the charter school advocacy side, they spoke to people at the Arizona Charter Schools Association — a private organization promoting charters which, if not officially a lobbying group, exists to help and promote charters — and someone at Center for Education Reform — a D.C. school choice (read charters and vouchers) advocacy group.

On the charter school critic side they spoke to  . . . well, no one, at least not anyone who the reporters mentioned. The other people they spoke to are at Sunnyside and TUSD school districts, and those folks rightly didn't say anything negative about charter schools. That would have smacked of sour grapes. The district school people tried to promote educational efforts being made in their districts rather than go after charters.

Here are a few things the reporters might have heard if they spoke to charter critics — or even to someone like me who advocates charters but is well aware of their weaknesses.

• The only recent comprehensive study comparing AZ charter school student achievement with the achievement of similar students in district schools found that district school students scored slightly higher than charters on standardized tests. It was a large study conducted by a group of Stanford researchers looking at a number of states. In some cases, charters did slightly better, in others, like Arizona, slightly worse. So if students are moving to charter schools, there are no results showing they're getting a better education as is implied in the article. As a matter of fact . . .
• A study from the Bush administration concluded there is very little difference between the achievement of similar students in district, charter and private schools. The only type of school that scored significantly lower than the others was conservative Christian private schools.
• The students in the Star article tend to be high achievers who feel they're getting something better at charter or private schools. And there's a good chance they're right. A small charter school with highly academic, college prep standards can attract top students and expel others who aren't achieving or are causing trouble. It can be a wonderful place for motivated, intelligent students. The article ignored the many charters geared toward low achievers and potential dropouts. Many of those schools are pretty ghastly, and too many of them are run by people who are in it to make a buck — people who lure parents with the promise of a private school quality education that will get their children into college, then sit students down in front of computers half the day working through rote, boring, packaged lessons. Students who return to district schools from those places often find they've slipped further behind.

If the Star is going to write an article comparing district and charter schools, it should present a balanced picture of the two. If the reporters are going to play it safe and write a He said/She said kind of story, they need to find knowledgeable critics of charter schools to balance the glowing portrayals from well funded organizations which exist to sing charters' praises.

Finding knowledgeable critics is a bit harder to do, since there are no well funded organizations which exist to criticize charters or to critique them objectively. There are profs in universities and people like me who spend a lot of time reading about this stuff. But those types of people are harder to locate, and they're not versed in the fine art of massaging the media, so they don't always come up with the perfect sound bytes that make reporters working on tight deadlines quietly weep with joy.

Education writers need to cultivate some sources they can call on to tell both sides of the story, or the bias in their work, even the kind of bias in tone that comes through in this article, will detract from its overall quality and value.