Charter school report lacks substance, ignores research

Contact:

Tina Trujillo
University of California, Berkeley
(510) 642-6272
trujillo@berkeley.edu

William Mathis, NEPC
(802) 383-0058
William.Mathis@colorado.edu

BOULDER, CO (Sept. 13, 2011) – A new Center for American Progress (CAP) report, Charting New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn Around the Nation’s Dropout Factories, by Melissa Lazarín promotes charter schools as a means of turning around high schools that are labeled “dropout factories.” However the report relies on a one-sided reading of haphazardly collected supporting material, and it ignores extensive contrary evidence, according to an expert review by professor Tina Trujillo of the University of California, Berkeley.

The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

Charting New Territory argues that charter school operators should be encouraged and given freer access and autonomy to manage perennially low-performing high schools. The report claims to draw on the experiences of the Los Angeles and Philadelphia school districts to support its arguments. According to the CAP report, both districts offer exemplary cases in the quest to “turn around” so-called dropout factories, i.e., high schools where the number of 12th graders was substantially lower than the number of 9th graders four years earlier.

The CAP report calls for expanding Charter Management Organization autonomy over all aspects of school operation. The recommendations include weakening union contracts, ensuring financial support for turnaround schools, relaxing regulations on these schools, and cultivating greater public support for such arrangements.

The report’s primary advocacy is, according to Trujillo, for a “less regulated environment for these charter schools.” Yet the evidence cited in support of the report’s proposals is weak at best, consisting primarily of interviews with various interested parties – some of them likely self-serving – such as charter school advocates and operators who have not previously done school turnaround work. The Trujillo review cautions that “no theoretical or substantive rationale behind the report’s sources of evidence is provided to justify why the particular interview respondents or literature sources were selected or how their data were evaluated.”

The CAP report also draws heavily on a variety of non-scientific sources: blog posts, popular media, foundation reports, charter operators’ marketing materials, and ideologically oriented think tank publications. Trujillo points out that “the report routinely offers a range of unsubstantiated claims that are not supported by any evidence or that ignore existing evidence to the contrary.” Notably absent is a review of the nascent research literature on the effectiveness of turnarounds, or the research on analogous reforms that have been implemented to dramatically change school staffing, organization, and management.

Trujillo concludes: “The reforms advocated by the report seek to use our nation’s neediest schools—those serving primarily poor children and children of color—as laboratories for educational experiments, notwithstanding existing evidence that the experiments will not succeed. In doing so, the report distracts policymakers and practitioners from more fundamental questions about the types of policies that can secure the necessary conditions for all students to succeed.”

Find Tina Trujillo’s review on the NEPC website at:

http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charting-new-territory

Find Charting new territory: Tapping charter schools to turn around the nation’s dropout factories by  Melissa Lazarín on the web at:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/06/charter_schools.html

The Think Twice think tank review project (http://thinktankreview.org), a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound, reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence.  For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.

This review is also found on the GLC website at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/