EXAMINING CHARTER SCHOOL CLAIMS

Recently, Terry Ryan, CEO of the Boise-based education nonprofit Bluum and of the Idaho Charter School Network, wrote an article in Idaho Education News decrying an Associated Press article which criticized charters as being among the most segregated schools in the country. Ryan noted that there have been criticisms leveled at the authors of the article.

But this is only one of a number of charter critiques that's been published lately. 

• The Network for Public Education recently published a fascinating document entitled "Charters and Consequences" which examined the status of charters across the country, looking at everything from fiscal abuses in charter schools to the questions of whether charter schools are really public schools.
• The American Civil Liberties Union issued "Schools Choosing Students" the story of "How Arizona Charter Schools Engage in Illegal and Exclusionary Student Enrollment Practices and How It Should Be Fixed".
• An editorial in the New Orleans Tribune titled"Faking the Grade"  lambasted the Recovery School District in New Orleans, created over a decade ago, which is about to return schools it "charterized" to the Orleans Parish, for the lack of academic progress it made.
• Andre Perry wrote in the Hechinger Report "Tolerating failing schools in New Orleans — so long as they’re for black kids" in which he criticized the same New Orleans charter effort.
• Gary Rubinstein, the blogger who unmasks "Miracle Schools", wrote about the demise of the state-run experiment in Memphis, in his article entitled "The Great Tennessee Achievement School District Experiment Finally Comes To An End".
• Charles E. Pierce wrote in Esquire, "Our School Systems Deserve Better Than This, a scathing indictment of charters across the country.
• Over on the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy blog, there's an interesting piece on the Summit Online Charter system, , entitled "Update on Summit Schools including my visit to a Summit Charter School".
• In Diane Ravitch's blog, the author writes about "Broward County, Florida: Another Charter School Scandal", the latest in a long line of charter scandal news this year.
• Recently, two articles in Idaho Ed News highlighted disconcerting news about charters:
•  In August, Kevin Richert wrote "National Survey Shows Declining Support for Charter Schools" noting results from a survey conducted by conservative education organization Education Next.
• In June, Devin Bodkin write a piece entitled "Idaho Charter Schools Underserve Minority and Poor Populations"

Since these are just a few of the recent articles about charters, it's curious that Ryan opted to respond to the Associated Press article.  However, his claim is that Idaho charters are different:

From his op-ed: "In Idaho, critics have accused public charter schools of pulling the highest performing students out of their traditional public-school classrooms and creating student populations that do not reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. In 2015, a Boise-based organization, Centro de Communidad y Justicia, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s (US DOE) Office of Civil Rights. According to that complaint, “Idaho’s charter school system has evolved into an unequal public-school system that discriminates against students of color, LEP students, students with disabilities (many of whom are Latino), and students from low-income families.” The hard charging US DOE’s Office of Civil Rights under President Obama never acted on this complaint apparently finding little merit in it."

To prove his point, Ryan cites Idaho State Department data to show that Idaho's charters as a whole, while not matching Idaho demographics, come very close to the demographics of the Boise and West Ada districts.

There are a few problems with Ryan's arguments:

• First and foremost, Idaho's charters as a whole are not a school district; they are a bunch of disparate schools which are spread across the state of Idaho.
• Idaho charters are mostly k-8 or k-6 schools, so comparing to k-12 systems is an apples-to-oranges measure.
• Selecting certain demographics and ignoring others is cherry-picking -- it's important to note that Idaho has a large number of Limited English students, and the charter system has almost none.

Here are the data with regard to Boise's charters and the District as a whole.

If we really want to look at how Idaho's charters are doing, we should follow the example set by Anser, a Boise charter that is sponsored by the Boise School District. Each year, Anser's staff and their Board chair appear before the Boise Board of Trustees and present their annual report. As part of the report, they compare school performance with demographically similar schools in the District. Since Anser's free/reduced percentage is in the teens, they compare their performance with Roosevelt and Washington Schools in the Boise District. At some levels, Anser has superior achievement to the District schools; in others, they have lower achievement. But Anser makes an appropriate comparison and uses the data to set goals and improve performance. 

For the most part, we would agree that we have not seen the widespread problems that have occurred elsewhere with charters in Idaho. However, charters in general do not reflect the demographics of the school districts in which they reside.