Charter Schools?

The way test scores and graduation rates are used in school report cards often adversely affect the perspective of parents and community leaders when evaluating and comparing schools or districts – especially in the case of charter schools. In particular, the report cards overlook the obstacles presented by poverty in Lexington Two, which makes both overall academic achievement and attending charter schools more difficult for many of our students.

While all students and families are different, looking across all students, wealth is associated with things like more guidance at home doing homework, availability of tutoring, quality of health-care, family stability, higher quality treatment for disabilities, greater likelihood of being a native English speaker, quality of pre-school, amount of quality early childhood reading and communications, etc…  It would be shocking if schools with more students from well-to-do families – who on average started off ahead in reading and math, and have more resources at home if they ever fall behind – didn’t tend to have much higher average test scores and graduation rates than schools with more students without those advantages.  This is true even if students of similar backgrounds at both schools did exactly the same.

Many parents and guardians use these misleading average test scores and graduation rates to make decisions about their own child’s education – even if that average doesn’t reflect how their own student would be expected to perform. And parents and guardians positioned best to explore and take advantage of these decisions are those with more resources at home. Because of this, charter schools can become a siphon that further reduces the test scores and graduation rates for the local schools – even if it doesn’t change anything about the education each individual student obtains in the local schools, and even if the charter school is completely average based on its students’ household income level. 

The local schools aren't left unchanged, however, as the correlates of poverty require extra resources to overcome.  If a district has a higher percentage of students who need that extra help, but the per student amount they have doesn’t increase to counteract that, how is it reasonable to expect them to carry on as they had before?  Recruiting teachers often becomes harder too, as the distribution of courses they would teach changes (do all teachers get to teach advanced courses now and then, or just one?) and because they aren’t immune to viewing test scores the way the parents and community leaders do.
 

Charter schools can be wonderful for some individuals and districts, but catastrophic for others.  Without proper regulation, they can play into the hands of those seeking to undermine public schools in general.