Charter Accounting

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

With the clock ticking on the last days of the regular legislative session this year, lawmakers in Albany might be well advised to reflect quietly for a moment on how their constituents will rate their education reform record come November. Not very highly, if the legislature’s apparent unwillingness to increase the state’s draconian cap on charter schools persists. A recent accounting of the performance of the state’s current charter schools themselves shows why lawmakers are taking a big risk in appeasing the teachers’ unions at the expense of the state’s children.

The state’s department of education has prepared a report that compares performance on standardized tests between charter schools and the regular public schools in the districts enclosing the charters. The charters’ results are impressive. A majority of them tied or outperformed their local public schools on reading and math tests administered in the fourth and eighth grades. In some cases, the difference is dramatic. Here in the city, for example, the Carl C. Icahn charter school had no students testing in the bottom level of the fourth grade reading tests, compared to 10.1% of students in the surrounding ninth community school district. The charter had 13.8% in the second-lowest rung, compared to 42.3% of the public schools’ students. A combined 86.2% of students scored in the top two levels, in which students can expect to pass or excel at the Regents exams one day, compared to fewer than half of the students in the regular schools.

The latest numbers on charters look even better in historical context. When charters first started appearing in the state, they often underperformed the adjoining public school districts, leading some critics to scoff that this was a frivolous education reform. Time has shown, however, that charters possess a remarkable ability to improve those results, bringing us to the current round of numbers. This historical perspective, incidentally, also undermines the argument of charter critics that any success is due to charters skimming the best students from the public schools. Quite the contrary. Charters appear to have been taking students who were struggling the most, leading to the low initial test scores, and then effecting significant improvement in those students. When comparing individual student improvement over time, charters have always come out winners.

No wonder that some members of the Assembly, beholden as they are to anti-charter teachers’ unions, are looking for any wisp of an excuse they can find to continue the charter cap. At the moment, some of them are claiming that charter supporters poisoned the political debate by running hard-hitting pro-charter ads in three legislators’ districts. That line would be slightly more believable if the complainers – Ron Canestrari of Albany, Susan John of Rochester, and Francine DelMonte of Niagara Falls – hadn’t opposed charters even before the ads started running. Their feelings may have been hurt, but what about the parents of children desperate to get into charters?

The spotlight now is on Governor Pataki. Charters have been a cornerstone of his education reform efforts, and in lifting the cap he has leverage to use with the legislature, including the possibility of a special session. He has floated the possibility of doing so to push them to expand the state’s DNA databank, with what at deadline appeared to be success. Charters are an equally worthy goal. If such a special session were held in October, right before the election, it would prove even more educational than television spots for voters evaluating the records of their legislators. New Yorkers are waiting to see whether Albany scores as well as charter schools have in advancing the cause of education reform.


The New York Sun

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