Today, the American Federation of Teachers, at its convention in Las Vegas, is turning in a report on charter schools. The report — entitled “Do Charter Schools Measure Up? The Charter School Experiment After 10 Years” — will serve mainly to give a glimpse of the bankruptcy of the teachers unions’ opposition to all forms of educational choice that threaten the status quo. The data are distorted, and the undertone of the report seems to us to be that students are commodities meant to serve the system’s needs. Even the report’s title is misleading given that only two out of the 23 state laws authorizing charter schools were passed before 1993 and almost half were passed after 1995.

The AFT complains that only about 25% of charter schools have instituted merit pay — an odd complaint, given merit pay has been instituted at 0% of traditional public schools. The AFT also complains that charter schools spend a greater proportion of their budgets on administration than traditional public schools. But they maintain all of their own administrators instead of relying on existing, if often failing, state education bureaucracies. The AFT sneers that commercially operated schools do not contribute to innovation because “they offer a single ‘cookie-cutter’ school design” — another odd complaint from the stewards of America’s socialistic school system.

While the AFT rejects the trope that charter schools cream the middle-class and bright students from traditional public schools, they do accuse the schools of discouraging enrollment by the disabled and of being more segregated by race than traditional public schools. But while traditional public schools try to herd as many students into special education as possible in pursuit of the extra funding such designations bring, charter schools typically get no extra funding for disabled students, and have no such incentives. As for race and class differences, the claim doesn’t jibe with a 2000 study by the Department of Education that found that charter schools enrolled a disproportionately large number of minorities compared to their states’ public schools on average, and in line with the proportions in surrounding school districts.

The report is most dishonest when dealing with the topic of test scores. The AFT in one sentence dismisses a crucial report from California State University at Los Angeles that found that charter schools in California are better at helping low income students than traditional public schools. In that study, researchers compared schools based on how many students they had participating in a free school lunch program, presumably an indicator of the proportion of low-income students enrolled. In schools with at least 50% of students participating in the free lunch program, charter school students improved at a rate of 22% their California Academic Performance Index scores, as opposed to a rate of 19% for non-charter public school students. The rate of improvement was even higher when looking at schools where 75% of students participated in the lunch program, improving at a rate of 28% at charter schools, versus 24% for other public schools. The AFT also claims that in Texas continuous enrollment in charter schools hurt student achievement, when a study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation shows that after a first year drop when students enter a charter school, students show greater improvement in their Texas Assessment of Academic Skills in both reading and math than students in traditional public schools.

The data are not decisive in either direction. Charter school testing gains have been small and hard to pin down because of a lack of standardized testing. The nationwide testing requirements implemented by the Bush administration will help, and it seems that is what the unions are afraid of. The unions want to kill charter reform in the cradle before reliable data exist to vindicate the charter movement. After all, it presents an inconvenience to the AFT. “Charter schools complicate the planning and operation of school districts,” one headline in the report states. “Charter school laws vary in the extent to which they allow charter school teachers to bargain collectively,” reads another. They wouldn’t want students getting in the way of a good contract.