Thursday, March 7, 2013

The FLDOE charter study leaves out 159 schools. What are they hiding and why?

Charter schools are doing better than public schools on the FCAT and EOCs blah, blah, blah, yada, yada yada. Don’t believe the hype.

Resisting the urge to throw up in my mouth some, I will just get to it. The FLDOE reports that charter schools are doing better than public schools. Let’s forget for a moment how they for the most part pick who they take and keep which gives them a tremendous advantage over public schools when it comes to test results and let’s look at the states sample instead.

According to Jeff Solochek of the Tampa Times, 359 charter schools were graded. The problem with that is according to the State there are 518 charter schools. That means some 159 schools were exempt from their study. Geeze I wonder how public schools would do if each could exempt their 159 worst performing students. Also as far as I can tell none of the public schools were exempt. I wonder how the comparisons would have sorted out had 30% of public schools been excluded or if all the charter schools were included.

Maybe charter schools would do better overall, I doubt it but the problem is we don’t know and for some reason the state doesn’t want us to know.

And that friends, should tell you all you need to know.

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/florida-data-shows-charter-schools-outperform-traditional-schools-on-fcat/2107583

https://www.floridaschoolchoice.org/pdf/Charter_Student_Achievement_2012.pdf