A group of charter school organizations including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, issued a report this week that presents findings from a panel charged with developing a framework for judging the academic quality of charter schools. The report lays out four essential indicators of academic quality: student achievement, student progress over time, post-secondary readiness and success, and student engagement. Each indicator is accompanied by multiple measures, metrics, and benchmarks that define how each is to be operationalized. For example, student achievement measures include proficiency levels on state assessments, college entrance exam scores, and high school exit exams (as applicable). For the most part, the indicators and their corresponding data points are ones commonly used to measure quality (e.g., graduation rates, percentage of students passing high school exit exams). ??The report has, in a sense, packaged prior disparate indicators all together in one piece.
The report also appears to be a response to those who
believe that the vast diversity in charter school missions, educational models, and student populations--as well as differences in state accountability requirements and individual authorizer expectations--makes it impossible to establish common standards and measures of quality that are applicable and meaningful to all kinds of charter schools.
Advocates hold that a more comprehensive framework like this one will deter "reliance on snapshot data" that "lead to ill-informed judgments about charter schools."
In short, the report issues a resounding charge for charter school operators and authorizers to up the ante in terms of policing themselves and using standard data to foster accountability. Kudos to them. The charge is needed and noble.
The list, however, is fairly meaty--then there's the caveat that all of this is just a starting point. The main problem in my opinion, in fact, is the authors' admonishment that the framework (comprising 13 measures and 30 metrics total) must be used in its entirety , that choosing several indicators would "not be appropriate." No doubt if the charter community was to measure quality by reporting on all 13 measures (with their 30 metrics), we'd have plenty of very useful comparative data for these schools. I don't agree, however, that charter schools must report on the whole list, lest the framework be rendered null and void. I understand the concern with cherry picking data, but requiring charters to report on all of these data points may be more burdensome than necessary (a couple of the post-secondary readiness measures appear particularly hard to gather). I worry, like others, about the balance between flexibility, burden, and accountability in charter schools. And let us not forget that defining quality is a problem for all schools, not just charters--so the conversation about accountability and reporting norms, assuming they are to be strengthened, needs to be occurring in our non-charter schools as well.
