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WEIGH SCHOOLS' DATA CAREFULLY
Letter to the Editor, USA
Today, April 12, 2002
Charter schools work for the vast majority of children attending them. But in some states, problems stem primarily from an uneven approach toward assessment and data collection (''States ignore traps tripping up charter schools,'' Our View, Experiments in education debate, April 2).
For example, some states rank public schools by test data. Some charter schools appear at the bottom, and some appear at the top. But the availability of good data can impact negatively on where charter schools fall. Is a school that is open for only one or two years and focused on at-risk children a bad school because the children attending such a school are at a low performance level?
One charter school in Washington, D.C., has middle school students who came in reading at a third-grade level; its success should be measured not on how the school does in its first year, but on how it progresses year to year. All public schools -- charter and non-charter -- should be judged based on the value they add to a child's academic life from year to year. When a school system is deemed failing, it is because of consistent, repeated failure over time.
The new federal education law will bring about a welcome change in how states assess and report on performance, as it requires a look at progress from year to year. Since only a handful of states make those meaningful comparisons now, we should be more careful in evaluating charter schools until we have a sound basis for judgment: strong tests in all states that yield objective data about achievement.
In addition to school-based achievement data, that evaluation should include the demographics of the students, retention and mobility rates, parent and teacher satisfaction and whether or not there are research-based programs in place. These are the kinds of factors that affluent parents use on a regular basis to judge their selection of private schools and highly successful public schools.
Jeanne Allen
President
The Center for Education Reform
Washington, D.C.
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Jeanne Allen is president of the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C.