PRESS RELEASE:

Better Data Needed to Evaluate Charter School Effectiveness

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05/31/2006

Current research does not tell us enough about how charter schools affect student achievement but future studies could be dramatically improved, says an expert panel convened by the National Charter School Research Project.

“Everyone wants to know how charter schools are performing,” says Paul Hill, Chair of the Charter School Achievement Consensus Panel, “but largely because of inadequate data we aren’t learning what we need to know from existing research.”

A new report from the Consensus Panel, entitled Key Issues in Studying Charter Schools and Achievement: A Review and Suggestions for National Guidelines, examines the existing research on student achievement in charter schools and details how future research could be improved.

Julian Betts, Consensus Panel member and professor at the University of California, San Diego, explains how to improve future research: “Step one is for states to build databases that allow achievement to be tracked over time; step two is for funders of research to insist that the appropriate controls are employed in research they commission.”

Two key findings from the Consensus Panel’s report are that 1) no one research method or approach is problem problem-free, and 2) the results of studies focused on one kind of charter school cannot be generalized to all charter schools. This is because each charter school is in some way unique.

Therefore the Consensus Panel also recommends that the research community and other audiences should consider the pattern of results from multiple studies instead of relying on a single study for definitive results.

Consensus Panel members reviewed and rated more than 40 evaluations of charter school performance released between 2000 and 2005. They found that the studies evaluating charter schools nationally or across states were all ‘fair’ to ‘poor’. Increasingly rigorous methods were more common in those studies evaluating charter schools within a particular state, but findings from state-specific studies cannot be easily generalized to charter schools nationally. This is because charter school laws and oversight vary so widely from state to state.

The Consensus Panel includes nine outstanding researchers from different methodological traditions who, despite differing views on charter schools, all agree on the importance of improving the quality of charter school research on charter school outcomes. Members include:

• Julian Betts, University of California, San Diego
• Dominic J. Brewer, University of Southern California
• Anthony Bryk, Stanford University
• Dan Goldhaber, University of Washington
• Laura Hamilton, The RAND Corporation
• Jeffrey R. Henig, Columbia University
• Paul T. Hill, University of Washington
• Susanna Loeb, Stanford University
• Patrick McEwan, Wellesley College

Key Issues in Studying Charter Schools and Achievement will be presented at a May 31st research symposium for education researchers and foundations at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The National Charter School Research Project was established at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education in fall 2004 with the support from a consortium of foundations. The Charter School Achievement Consensus Panel was convened in early 2005, with the goal of improving the quality of future charter school research. The Center on Reinventing Public Education is part of the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. The Charter School Achievement Consensus Panel was convened in early 2005, with the goal of improving the quality of future charter school research.