Report—Charters Will Help All Public Schools
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
The Rhode Island Campaign for Achievement Now is calling for the state to approve more charter schools, saying they will help close the achievement gap between students and boost the state’s overall educational performance.
In an issue brief released yesterday, RI-CAN again made the case for charters, in an effort to get the state to approve the proposed Achievement First charter school, which would serve students in Cranston and Providence.
In Rhode Island, students in existing charter schools score higher on reading and math tests than other public school pupils, according to RI-CAN. In reading, 67 percent tested as proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam—compared with 56 percent in other public schools in the same districts. In math, 49 percent were proficient in charter schools versus 40 percent of their peers in the same communities, according to the RI-CAN data.
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But RI-CAN said charter schools will do more than just help raise the scores of students who attend them. The education reform group said they also will help improve the performance of students in traditional school environments—sort of an educational twist on the old saying that a rising tide will lift all boats.
“Across the country, successful charter schools and networks often inspire innovation and transformation in the districts and states where they are located,” RI-CAN said. “By pushing the envelope, charter schools can model innovative practices to serve students and increase achievement in ways that traditional schools can also adopt.”
But charter school skeptics wonder how they can help traditional schools when they are costing them lost funding. RI-CAN maintains that charters do not increase educational costs because the money follows the student from a traditional school to the charter.
Critics: charters do cost school districts money
But that claim rests on a shaky assumption, critics say. Say for example that the cost of educating an individual student in a traditional school costs $8,000. Once that student leaves a traditional classroom, that money follows him or her to the charter school, but the district is still saddled with the cost of paying the full salary and benefits for the teacher in the traditional school, said John McDaid, an education activist and blogger from Portsmouth.
McDaid said it’s unlikely that a sufficient number of students would transfer to a charter to justify cutting a teaching position. “They make the argument that it ‘raises the boats.’ The issue for me is the concrete impact of removing the funding for the students from the rest of the district,” McDaid said. “They can’t cut that number of teachers. They can’t recoup that $8,000.”
He also questioned the RI-CAN data that indicates charter school students perform better. A series of national studies published over the past year in Education Week, he said, are inconclusive.
“The achievement of students is the most important goal. We need to get them there, but we need to get them there in a way that doesn’t impact the students remaining in the traditional schools,” McDaid said.
A spokeswoman for RI-CAN was unavailable for comment yesterday.
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