Journalists and Charter Schools

Eduwonkette has some beef with the Washington Post's recent coverage of charter schools, specifically the Post's claim that public charter schools are outperforming district-run public schools (thanks Chad) on student achievement measures. Accompanying the test score results, the Post reported on the successful practices many schools engage in as reasons for their high scores - many of which wouldn't be possible without the freedom granted to these schools through charter schooling:

With freedom to experiment, the independent, nonprofit charters have emphasized strategies known to help poor children learn -- longer school days, summer and Saturday classes, parent involvement and a cohesive, disciplined culture among staff members and students.

Eduwonkette's complaint is about the accuracy of the Post's comparisons and she reaches back to 2004 and the hubbub that followed the AFT's report, which found that charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools. Eduwonkette's problem seems to be that charter school advocates are happy to take results coming from bad research design (the Post's coverage) so long as they are favorable, but jumped all over the research design of the AFT's report when it came out, even taking out a full page ad in the New York Times.

Sure, advocates are always happy to see results that support their position, but it's not fair or even all that reasonable to compare the Post's journalistic reporting of one city's results with the AFT's research report comparing charter schools and traditional public schools nationwide. The AFT sought to make a judgment on charter school performance across the nation, and made pretty big claims about the results, saying that they, "reinforce years of independent research that show charter schools do no better and often underperform comparable, regular public schools". In contrast, the Post made conclusions about the performance of charter schools in just one city, and, to their credit, included a graphic that shows the variance in charter school performance, rather than just relying on averages to tell the story.

This variance is the most important point in the story - that there is nothing inherent to charter schooling that produces higher student achievement, but, given the flexibility, there are some very concrete things schools can do to dramatically improve student achievement. That's good news for both charter schools and district-run public schools. And it's very good news for students.

Of course Eduwonkette has a point about the difficulties inherent in drawing conclusions from these types of comparisons - it's difficult to get true random assignment or perfect control groups and there is interference from a host of confounding variables. And it's important that journalists understand and explain these limitations and contextualize the results. But I would argue that there are very different implications and responsibilities when this type of rough comparison is conducted by and reported in a newspaper article than when it comes as a research report from a national and very prominent organization.

It's also important to mention the Post's first story in their charter school series, this one focusing on potential conflicts of interest in the charter school board. Clearly, conflicts of interest are bad and should be avoided, but I'm having a hard time seeing 1) how, exactly, these conflicts of interest manifested themselves in bad decisions by the charter school board and 2) a negative impact on charter schools in D.C., which, as the second story indicates, are doing well in large part because of a rigorous approval process by the charter school board. As this letter to the editor states, it's very important that journalists avoid dragging someone through the mud simply because he happens to work in and have expertise in an area, and then volunteers his time to share that expertise in an official capacity. It sends a message to the business community that they, and their expertise, are not welcome in public education.