Policy Analysis for California Education
April 2003
You need not read much further than the title of this report to spot the authors' anti-charter leanings. While they cite national data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), what they do with it is focus on disparities in school inputs, based on the long-discredited assumption that more inputs yield greater achievement. Everybody knows that charter schools are under-funded, compared with regular public schools and, while it's good to have charter critics acknowledge this, it's not so good when they use this fact to try to persuade readers that charter schools are therefore ineffective educational institutions - a case this study never proves. Worse, they ignore the essential logic of the charter idea itself, namely that these schools OUGHT to be different from the conventional public schools to which they are alternatives. Instead, they fault charters for being different! Teacher certification is perhaps the most egregious example. In states where charter schools are free to hire whomever they like, school operators relish the opportunity to staff their classrooms - as private schools staff theirs - with knowledgeable individuals who didn't attend ed schools. Yet Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller and his PACE colleagues slam them for hiring "uncredentialed" teachers, as if there were some equivalence between certification and effectiveness! PACE also criticizes charters for "failing to identify children with special learning needs" and cites as evidence the fact that predominantly black charter schools are less likely to identify students as learning disabled. Given the well known "over-identification" problem that minority youngsters encounter in regular public schools, it seems that such statistics could be evidence of charters' success. But the PACE crew cannot countenance schools that deviate from the norm, even when the norm is flawed. If you want to see this skewed report for yourself, go to http://pace.berkeley.edu/Chartersummary.pdf.
