It’s taken me some time to craft this post, mostly because I had to allow myself sufficient time to calmame. In lieu of a bare knuckle MMA brawl, I offer the following in response to Jay Mathew’s report on the closing of the Tri-Community Public Charter School, entitled “Charter School to Close Over Academics” (The Washington Post, 6/9/2008).
Generally, I think that the discussion that Mr. Mathews spurs with his columns are an excellent way to draw attention to educational issues. However, upon viewing his columns from the perspective of a referenced party (my school is mentioned repeatedly), I realize that there are better ways to engender dialogue than to use poorly-researched statistics and meaningless variables to facilitate the drawing of unsound conclusions.
According to Mr. Mathews,
A list of the D.C. Charter Schools with the lowest reading and mathematics proficiency rates reveals that the closing of Tri-Community is the exception, not the rule, for struggling charters. Charter Schools with achievement rates even lower than Tri-Community’s are still open, in several cases because they serve a large number of students with learning disabilities or other special circumstances. (Emphasis added)
As a result of lumping all failing charter schools together (yes, I agree with his fundamental premise that charter schools are not quite making the grade), Mr. Mathews is making a severe ontological error. The table, “D.C.’s Lowest-Achieving Charters” lists several of the “worst performing” charter schools based at least, in part, on the findings of a non-profit that does not understand the fundamentals of statistical analysis. Mr. Mathew’s puts forth a harrowing statistic:
According to a FOCUS list of 58 D.C. Charter schools arranged by combined reading and math proficiency rates last year…[there were] two charter schools, City Lights and Next Step, with no students scoring at least proficient on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (D.C.-CAS) tests.
It is outrageous to have no students reading or doing mathematics at the proficient level, and Mr. Mathews’ exceptional reason for such educational shortcomings is that
[Booker T. Washington, Young America Works, Next Step and other] low achieving charters deal mostly with high school dropouts, including many adults, and focus on developing job skills rather than boosting reading and math scores to the highest levels.
Thus, developing job skills is incompatible with improving reading and math abilities of students. Such an awkward conclusion should have catalyzed further research into the reasons for these schools’ achieving at such a low level. A simple visit to our website would have informed Mr. Mathews that we only have approximately 85 students at any given time. A phone call to our receptionist could have informed him that at least 97% of our students live in households that do not speak English as their primary language, with over half of those students qualifying as English Language Learners. Finally, a brief conversation with our executive director would have provided him with our own harrowing statistic: no more than 4 students from our school take the DC-CAS in any given year.
