An analysis of state school data by a founder of the charter school movement in Indiana is a picture of disappointment for charters.
The article by Timothy P. Ehrgott, an early school choice champion in the state and founder and former president of a K-12 charter school in Indianapolis, is scathing in its assessment of charters’ effectiveness in Indiana.
The report was published in the March online edition of the Indiana Policy Review, a conservative-leaning policy journal.
Ehrgott based his conclusions on his own analysis of Indiana Department of Education data for the 2013-14 school year, comparing the proportion of charter schools with noncharter public schools (identified from this point on as public) that earned A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s or F’s last school year. Additional comparisons were made based on racial composition and the proportion of students eligible for the federal lunch program, matching up only those schools in the quintile with the highest percentage of those at-risk factors.
In his comparisons, noncharter public schools outperformed charters in almost every matchup — with a larger percentage of noncharter public schools earning A’s, and a larger percentage of charters failing, both in overall comparisons and when racial composition and poverty levels were matched.
Only when Ehrgott compared letter grades of 22 Indianapolis charter schools with Indianapolis School District schools with similar demographics (the district’s overall performance last year ranked sixth-lowest of the state’s more than 300 school districts) did charters outperform public schools. And that was not by much. The charters averaged out at a C, and the Indianapolis public schools a C-minus, he said in the report. “That is not a superior result; it is slightly better, or in another way of looking at it, not quite as bad,” he wrote.
Moving away from comparisons, Ehrgott added up the various letter grades of all 59 charters in the study. His count showed that charter schools earning “bad” grades — that is, D’s or F’s, out numbered charter schools with “good” grades — A’s or B’s — by a 33-to-22 margin.
Separate study’s findings
Another recent study that was not based on the state’s A-F grading system showed Indianapolis charter schools doing better than Ehrgott’s assessment of “not quite as bad.”
That study, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, concluded students in urban charter schools were doing better than those in urban public schools, and Indianapolis charters were among the performance leaders. The study, which got considerable national publicity but which some social scientists question, used a complex formula matching charter students with up to seven public school students of similar backgrounds.