The latest progress reports for public schools are one more sign that New York City’s charter schools are making exceptional gains with their students. Nearly half of charters got the top grade of A, compared with 25 percent of all schools citywide.
I know: Many people find the progress reports admittedly confusing and complicated. But these results are significant because the reports are the most accurate tool we have to compare how schools with similar student populations are doing.
The reports base a school’s grade on three things:
* Overall student performance at the school.
* The progress its students make from year to year.
* And the school’s culture, based on the attitudes of parents, teachers and students.
The reports take into account the fact that schools are different — that a school on the Upper East Side has fewer challenges than, say, a school in the South Bronx — and base each school’s overall grade largely on how well it performs compared to other schools with the same challenges.
That’s why these reports are so important. The majority of charters serve low-income African-American and Latino students — children the city has long struggled to do a good job of educating. And the progress reports show that charter schools are beating the odds.
Critics like to say charters succeed because they serve fewer children with special needs and English Language Learners. But if that were charter schools’ only “advantage,” then theprogress reports would expose the illusion. Instead, charter schools won higher grades — both overall and in every subcategory, including students’ academic growth over time compared to other schools that share the same population.
These results echo the positive findings about New York City charter schools in research that controls for student differences, including a 2009 study by the prestigious CREDO research group at Stanford University.
That’s not all. The progress reports show several other positive trends for students attending charters:
* Charter middle schools take students who were performing below the citywide average in math and English in elementary school and move them ahead of the city average in math while narrowing the gap in English.
* English Language Learners at charter schools become proficient in English at faster rates. Citywide, many immigrant students take five years or longer to learn the language; charters get the job done more quickly.
* Special-education students in charters are more likely to move, either into general-education status or into less restrictive settings (such as a mainstream classroom with extra support). In a city with extremely high rates of special-ed classification, particularly for black and Hispanic male students, this, too, is significant progress.
These positive results say a lot about the approach charters take to improve achievement — such as longer hours, achievement-focused school cultures and teacher training.
Charters aren’t the onlysolution to our public-education crisis — but the fact is, they’re having success with students that other schools have long struggled to educate.
Instead of constantly trying to pick apart these achievements, critics and others should take a harder look at why many charters are succeeding, and start figuring out how to put these ideas to use in all public schools.
James D. Merriman is CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.