"Charter school policy is important. It’s worth arguing about. But those arguments can get a bit off-track and even ridiculous. Recently, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) released a national study of charter schools, the results of which suggest that less than one hundredth of one percent (<0.01 percent) of the variation in test performance in reading is explainable by charter school enrollment. Yet based on this, CREDO issued a press release stating that “charter school students now have greater learning gains in reading than their peers in traditional public schools.” This conclusion was repeated in newspapers across the nation.
I hope that, upon reading such claims, readers immediately ask two questions: Is that difference of any practical significance whatsoever? and Is this study really able to detect such infinitesimal differences? For both questions, the answer is ‘no’. But like a Kardashian, the import of the CREDO studies goes way beyond the justifiable.
CREDO’s charter school research burst onto the scene in 2009, with the release of a national study backed by a strong promotional effort. The 2009 study is probably best known through “Waiting for Superman“, a film backed by an even greater promotional effort. The ‘Superman’ narrator tells the audience that “one in five” charter schools is excellent. The actual finding from the study is that of the charters researched, 17% (which is really one in six) had better results than the comparison student results attributed to conventional public schools, while 37% did worse.
The publicity effort soon combined with the appeal of the study to some charter critics, who used those numbers to argue that conventional publics performed more than twice as well as charters. The buzz around the study was enormous; at one point, it seemed like “the CREDO study” was synonymous with “charter school research.” And the strengths, weaknesses, methods, and even the findings of the study were not well understood.
In truth, sometimes the best and most responsible understanding of a controversial report is neither black nor white. Sometimes we need to be able to embrace some nuance—in a specific study and in the overall evidence. That’s certainly the case here.
The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), which I direct, has reviewed three CREDO charter school studies: the original 2009 national study that is described briefly above, as well as the 2013 follow-up national study and the 2013 study of Michigan charters. These reviews are part of the NEPC’s “Think Twice” think tank review project, which provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications.
Because the CREDO studies have taken on such outsized importance, it is worthwhile to take a step back and consider those studies—with the help of the three NEPC reviews—and also to consider how they fit within the larger body of charter school research about test-score outcomes. The truth has always been that the CREDO studies are valuable and sound, but limited, contributions to an overall body of charter school research. This was true of the 2009 report/study, and it’s true of the more recent CREDO studies. The scope of the CREDO studies makes them among the most important in the field—they are based on datasets that capture most charters in the nation—but they have never deserved the ‘single, definitive study’ status sometimes accorded them. And there are good reasons for exercising caution when using the studies’ findings.
NEPC was not among those who argued that the original CREDO findings proved charters were doing meaningfully worse than publics. Instead, the review and the press release placed the CREDO study within the larger body of research and summarized the findings as follows: “The primary findings of the CREDO report show that charter school students’ test performance is basically the same as the performance of students enrolled in traditional public schools.” Notwithstanding the 17 percent/37 percent figures, the study if read properly did not show much separation between the sectors."
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