"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

New York Times Editorial Fails Another Fact Check on Charter Schools

The NYTimes Editorial Board is one of the most reliable voices for the corporate education losers who continue to double down on testing accountability policies and privatization schemes that now have decades of evidence to substantiate their failure.  Today's entry is on charter schools, which has this nugget:

The editorial states:

"A study published earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers."


This is simply a lie. Even if you give credence to the CREDO study, which has been critiqued for sloppy documentation and unexplained use of something called 
"days of learning," the results shows no impact for New York City charters in Reading (0.00), while showing significant charter impacts in Math (0.11) (see p. 53 of linked report). 



Given the Wall Street resource advantage that charters have and the fact that they accept fewer special education and ELL students, one would expect big differences in both reading and math, especially when the matched public schools are often the poorest in the district. 



And what is totally masked by measuring "charter impact" are the deepening knowledge proficiency gaps between the poor and the middle class. The result: children are left further behind in corporate charters that use total compliance and zero tolerance methods that no middle class parent would ever allow.

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