I’m proud to teach high school math at The Soulsville Charter School. Every day I come to work confident that my students are receiving the best education that I and my colleagues can give them. I see students and teachers working hard in a collaborative and constructive environment that has resulted in 100 percent of our graduating seniors being accepted to 4 year colleges three years running. But we can’t just rely on anecdotes to prove our effectiveness. Soulsville, and indeed all charter schools, need to be able to prove their effectiveness through data, not just hearsay. This is more important than ever given the likely growth in the charter school movement in our state. Its also important to take a critical look at charters using data because some people tell charter stories that aren’t as positive as mine. Many detractors use their own anecdotes to claim that charters should be abolished all together. They claim that charters aren’t any better than traditional public schools and that their claims to overcome poverty should be equated to charlatans selling fools gold or snake oil. Even when individual charters are found to be effective, detractors claim that these effects should be discounted because charters serve lower percentages of impoverished students than do traditional public schools. They also claim that charters “skim” the best students out of the general school population, that is, take the best and leave the rest, and that their achievement can therefore be explained by their students starting at a higher academic level than their peers. If these accusations are true, they would and should call into question the entire charter movement. The problem is that they each fall apart when we look at the hard data behind charter schools here in Tennessee. I’ll go deeper into each of these claims throughout this piece using data from two sources, the CREDO National Charter School Study and Tennessee’s Charter Schools Annual Report for 2012-2013, but here’s a brief summary of what we’ll find;
- Data shows charters in Tennessee serve a more impoverished and higher minority population than traditional public schools
- Data shows that charter school students in Tennessee start at a lower academic level than their peers, refuting the “skimming” claim
- Data shows that Tennessee charters outpace traditional public schools on both growth and academic achievement measures
- This all suggests that charters are making meaningful progress towards overcoming poverty and closing the achievement gap
Who Are the Charters? Before digging into the data, lets get our bearings as to who charter schools serve here in Tennessee. According to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) Study of charter schools, our nation contains approximately 6,000 charter schools serving 2.3 million students per year nationally (as of 2012-2013). Tennessee contains 49 of these charter schools (again, as of 2012-2013) serving a population of 11,698 students. The table below shows the concentration of charter schools in Tennessee by district.
Tennessee’s Charter School Annual Report, Page 5 http://www.tennessee.gov/education/schools/docs/Annual_CS_report_2013.pdf
Exhibit A: Who Do Tennessee Charters Serve?
Tennessee’s Charter School Annual Report, Page 5 http://www.tennessee.gov/education/schools/docs/Annual_CS_report_2013.pdf
Who do these 49 charter schools serve? Is their population really different than traditional public schools as detractors claim? When we examine the data, we do in fact see a difference, though not the one they would like to see. Here in Tennessee, charters serve a higher percentage of students in poverty (measured with %Free or Reduced Price Lunch), a higher percentage of minority students and a comparable percentage of students receiving special education to traditional public schools. This is evident in the table to the right, pulled from Tennessee’s Charter Schools Annual Report from 2012-2013. In summary, the demographics claims made by charter detractors can be discarded at the aggregate. There may be individual exceptions but on the whole Tennessee charters are in fact educating a more impoverished and higher minority population in every district in which they operate. Exhibit B: Are Tennessee Charters Skimming the Best?
Stanford CREDO Study, Page 13 http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/NCSS%202013%20Final%20Draft.pdf
Next, lets examine the validity of the anecdotal “skimming the best students” claim made by charter detractors. If skimming were taking place, we would expect the average charter school student to start at an academic level near the average public school student. What we find is quite different. The CREDO study found that Tennessee charter students typically start at a much lower academic level than their peers across the state. Tennessee students began 0.41 standard deviations below the average in reading and 0.42 standard deviations below in math. Using the table to the right (from the CREDO study), this equates to starting 288 days behind in both reading and math. To put that in perspective, the average charter school student would need a year and a half’s worth of growth just to catch the average Tennessee student statewide. On the whole this data suggests that charters are not, in fact, skimming the best and leaving the rest. Exhibit C: Are Tennessee Charters Closing the Achievement Gap? We’ve now established that Tennessee charter schools serve a population similar to traditional public schools and that their students start off well behind the average Tennessee public school student. But are charters helping students overcome these disadvantages and make meaningful progress towards closing the achievement gap? Or are the detractors correct when they claim that poverty is deterministic when it comes to student achievement? Here we have some great news. The CREDO Study found that charter school students in Tennessee gained 86 days more in reading and 72 days more in math than their peers in traditional public schools. When we compare this to charters in other states, our reading gains tied with Rhode island for the highest in the country and our math gains are fifth behind only Rhode Island, Washington DC and New York City and New York State. With those numbers, it would take the average student starting in a charter in Tennessee three and a half years in reading and four years in math to overcome the starting gap highlighted in Exhibit B between the average charter student and the average non charter student in Tennessee. That won’t fix the achievement gap in a year, but if charter gains are sustained over 3-4 years, the gap would theoretically disappear. Over time this data does suggest that Tennessee charters at the aggregate have the potential to show that poverty doesn’t have to be destiny. Exhibit D (bonus): Are Tennessee Charters Making a Dent in Absolute Achievement? Tennessee charters don’t just perform above average when it comes to growth. They’re also doing better than the average public school on measures of absolute student achievement. Consider the performance of charters vs traditional public schools in the state’s two largest districts, Shelby County and Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). You can see a comparison between charters and non charters in the two tables below for these districts (note: I’ve only included 3-8 scores for Nashville because they only have one charter high school at present). In both districts charter achievement ties or exceeds absolute district achievement in all subjects. In Shelby County, charter students do even better in high school, exceeding the absolute achievement of traditional public schools by 5 percent or more in every subject. And lets keep in mind that we’re also comparing charters to every non charter in the district, including some that don’t share the same student profiles as the charters in question. If we could remove these schools from the traditional population, charters would do even better by comparison. This is pretty impressive given the population being served by charters. Given that the charter student population is higher poverty, we would likely expect that their average achievement would be lower than the district average if poverty is indeed destiny. However, this is not the case. Higher scores in charter high schools should give credence to the idea that sustained charter growth can make a meaningful impact on overcoming the achievement gap if those gains are sustained over time.
Table created with Microsoft Excel, data from the Tennessee Charter Schools Annual Report http://www.tennessee.gov/education/schools/docs/Annual_CS_report_2013.pdf
Table created with Microsoft Excel, created with data from Tennessee’s Charter Schools Annual Report http://www.tennessee.gov/education/schools/docs/Annual_CS_report_2013.pdf
A Quick Summary Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve learned from examining the data around charter schools in Tennessee. On average, charters statewide serve a more impoverished, higher minority population than traditional public schools. Their students start at a lower point academically, but they achieve more growth on a yearly basis than traditional public schools. Within the state’s two largest districts they also show equal or higher achievement on an absolute scale than traditional district schools, and this gets larger once students reach high school. This all suggests that charters are in fact making a measurable impact on closing the achievement gap. I’d say the claims of charter detractors have been pretty well refuted here in Tennessee. Closing: How’s My School Doing? So how does my school, Soulsville, come out when we look at our hard data? Turns our success isn’t just anecdotal. Our average ACT score in 2013 was a 20.1, compared to 16.1 for our school district. Our high school’s value added scores in all subjects were well above projected levels and 2 of the 4 TCAP subjects saw above predicted growth. And this sustained effort over time led to our 2014 graduating class being offered over $10 million in scholarship offers, along with another year of 100 percent acceptance to four year colleges. Are we perfect? No, but we never claim to be. We’re doing some amazing things and along with the other charter schools of Tennessee, working hard every day to make a measurable dent in the achievement gap. We’re a part of the solution and its time we are recognized as such by all parties. After all, we have the data to prove it. All data in this piece was drawn from the CREDO National Charter School Study, the Tennessee Department of Education’s Charter Schools Annual Report 2012-2013 and the Tennessee State Report card from 2013. All of this data is available publicly and can be accessed by anyone. By Jon Alfuth Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiam and #TNedu to find more of our stories. Please also like our page on facebook. The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author and do not represent those of any affiliated organizations.
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