When the recent report was released stating that children in charter schools were not out performing students in more traditional public schools, I thought that the comparison was not valid.
The major reason is, the kids in charter schools are more likely to be kids who are under performing.
Clarence Page takes it one step further:
You don't need to read very far into the AFT report, for example, before you discover that the gap in test scores between charter and public schools disappears when you take race into account. Compare white students with white students and blacks with blacks and Hispanics with Hispanics and the gap in scores between the charters and traditional public schools goes away.
That's important because charter schools enroll a higher proportion of minority students. More than half of charter school pupils were black, Hispanic or American Indian in the 1999-2000 academic year, compared with one-third for all public schools, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
Charters also enroll a higher proportion of students who were not doing well for one reason or another in public schools, which makes the stories of successful charters all the more amazing.
Check out the entire article.