AFT analysis uncovers poor charter school results

Dismal performance buried on Bush administration Web site

The 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math and reading shows charter schools typically underperform regular public schools—but the Bush administration has repeatedly delayed getting this information out. This is a major finding of a recent AFT report, which generated a media explosion and sharp questions not only on charter schools but also on the administraton's commitment to keeping them accountable to the public.

The AFT analysis of the NAEP charter school achievement data shows that charter school students mostly underperform and sometimes score about as well as regular public school students. Researchers at the AFT were able to unearth the NAEP charter school achievement data by using the Web-based NAEP Data Tool, a difficult, if not impossible, task for a layperson. The 2003 NAEP charter school achievement data originally were scheduled for release in January 2004.

The NAEP data show:

• Compared to students in regular public schools, charter school students had lower achievement both in grade 4 and grade 8. These differences were all statistically significant except for grade 8 reading, and translate into about a half year of schooling.
  
• In grades 4 and 8, the percentages of charter school students performing at or above basic and at or above proficient were lower than the percentages for regular public school students.
  
• Scores of students who were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, as well as the scores of students who were not, were lower in charter schools than in regular public schools both in grades 4 and 8 in both math and reading.

After numerous delays, NAEP is scheduled to officially release the data this December. In the meantime, the NAEP results (often called the "gold standard" in education data) from the charter school sample are effectively unavailable to educators, parents and public policy makers. Further, the authorities responsible for NAEP plan to accompany the charter school achievement data with an analysis that adjusts the results. Not only is such an analysis unprecedented in NAEP's history, but NAEP is also prohibited from officially reporting its results in this fashion.

"The government's first obligation to the public was to release the NAEP charter school results, just like it does with other NAEP results," says Bella Rosenberg, an author of the AFT report. "Repeatedly delaying that report for the sake of packaging the results with an official explanation tarnishes NAEP's gold-standard reputation."

The repeated delays in releasing NAEP charter school achievement data are especially disturbing because one of the sanctions for schools that persistently fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is restructuring as a charter school. Many schools across the country are already in this predicament.

"Being transformed into a charter school is being held out as a solution for struggling public schools," says F. Howard Nelson, lead author of the AFT report. "But these NAEP data reinforce years of independent research that show charter schools do no better and often underperform."

NAEP is administered by an arm of the Department of Education; while members of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), who are appointed by the U.S. secretary of education, set the overall policy for NAEP. The governing board approved a plan from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to accompany the delayed charter school data with an analysis that adjusts the results.

Not only is this unprecedented in NAEP's 35-year history, it also violates a 1989 NAGB resolution prohibiting officially reporting NAEP with "adjusted" or "predicted" results because they "would be subject to serious methodological and political challenges." As then-NAGB member and charter school advocate Chester A. Finn said in 1994 when NAGB reaffirmed its 1989 board resolution, "while it was proper for researchers to prepare adjusted scores, it would be wrong for them to [be] part of a government report, such as NAEP; ... such scores would damage the credibility of [the] program." Nevertheless, the NCES plan calls for using hierarchical linear modeling "to try to determine whether charter school characteristics (governance, etc.) explain performance differences from other public schools."

The full AFT report is available at www.aft.org/pubs-reports/downloads/teachers/NAEPCharterSchoolReport.pdf.