Charter Advocate Questions Survey
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.
A leading advocate for charter schools, Chester Finn, said a new survey showing the poor performance of charter school students isn’t an accurate reflection of the effectiveness of the schools.
Fourth-grade students attending charter schools are less likely to be proficient in math and reading than fourth-grade students attending regular public schools, according to a recent nationwide survey, the New York Times reported today.
Mr. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, told The New York Sun that it is “premature” to judge how well charter schools are educating students because many of the schools are less than 4 years old.
“You don’t judge a person’s life when they are a kid, and you don’t judge a school’s effectiveness when it’s 3 years old,” Mr. Finn said. “Let’s see how they do in 2004, 2005, and 2006.”
Collected by the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the data shows that fourth-grade charter school students are about half an academic year behind their public school counterparts, according to the Times, which used figures given to it by the American Federation of Teachers, a major critic of the growing charter school movement.
The American Federation of Teachers calculated the figures from unsorted data available online. The U.S. Department of Education did not announce the findings, but the National Center for Education Statistics plans to release its own analysis, according to Mr. Finn.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently operated, and there are about 3,000 in America and 50 in New York. Supporters argue they break up the monopoly of the public school system and have the advantage of being free from regulations that prevent public schools from hiring the most qualified teachers.
Opponents have argued that charter schools are less likely to succeed than other schools, that they funnel money away from public schools, and that they steal away the best students from other schools.
Mr. Finn said charter schools usually attract students who are struggling in regular public schools. “For obvious reasons, the kids who go to charter schools are more apt to be poor, minority, and urban,” Mr. Finn said. “They are more apt to be fleeing from a bad education somewhere.”
