Children, the word for the day is 'Selection Bias.'
The stats on charter schools are tangled up in a lot of bad math. Here are three of the biggest statistical problems.
Admissions
Most (not all) charter schools are selective in their admissions. Many charter schools require applications for admission, guaranteeing that the students in the charter school are more motivated and likely to be higher performing. Even if schools admit students in a lottery, the students who choose to enter the lottery represent a self selected population of students who took time to gather data and work through paperwork. Finally, many charter schools require parents and students to sign contracts with concrete committments for parental involvement. These contract select for active and involved parents, a factor that is strongly associated with high academic performance.
Attrition
Public schools can't just kick out students who are failing, but charter schools can and do. One article, titled "New Study Finds San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Students Outperform Peers" compares the test scores of SF area KIPP schools with neighboring public schools and glosses over one of the most worrying statistics: 60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003-04 left before completing eighth grade.
Most public schools would have much more impressive statistics if they could boot 60% of underperforming students. And that's not a hypothetical statement. The much touted Texas Miracle boosted test scores by pressuring students to drop out right before high stakes tests. Whattaya know, average scores went up.
Aggregation
There's a whole new selection problem when the data on charter schools are aggregated. When charter schools start failing, they get closed. Failing public schools stay open and keep failing until they are (hopefully) overhauled. Failing charter schools drop out of long term data sets, leaving only high performing schools for comparison.
Certain individual charter schools do a fine job educating students, but I don't want to see major outlays for charter schools in general until I see the kind of math that I want these students to know. And keep in mind plenty of studies suggest that, on net, charter schools are not significantly better than public schools.
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W/ respect to charter schools, there are some pros they're considering that aren't absolute performance. Pros that can't be quantified.
I went to one, [https://www3.imsa.edu/] which was hilariously misrepresented by Salon [http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/01/24/perfect_high/index.html].
"Parents who *care* about their kids" were responsible for 'self-selecting' the kids who went to IMSA. A decent number of kids went unwillingly, but most of them manned up and adjusted to homesickness, the workload, etc. Retention rate was low. The senior class right now is like 180 ish but started at 230+.
Anyway, some unquantifiable reasons I think charter > public:
1. Since you're selecting for motivated/"smart" kids, you create an environment that is more accepting of nerdiness/fosters learning more than a public school [people tend to model their behavior off of that of others, especially kids, so nerds together = some form of 'group polarization' of nerdiness]. It's sort of the logic behind 'good colleges' - get the smart people together so they can all be nerdy together and do something useful [for society?]. It's hard to keep nerding in isolation if everybody else is as dumb as a sack of taters/if it's not 'cool' to learn.
2. Since IMSA ostensibly gets the smarties, it is able to enforce high standards [sophomore year, everybody had to write ~50 pages a semester for American Studies; also, the school offers 'college-level' math such as Real Analysis, Diff Eq]. Basically, it gives people who would have exhausted their old school curriculum a chance to learn.
3. The idea is investing in 'intellectual capital', I guess. You can't help everyone, so you throw some cash at the smartypants and hope they cure cancer.
Other random bs:
They should make public school a lot harder and not let kids d**k around anymore. Kids with too much leisure time get up to stupid s***. Math/science education espesh [I have a bias]. The reason most people I know start 'hating math' / 'will never take a college math class' / 'just were born bad at math, i never liked it' is because it was never taught well. Shaky foundation => tendency to make calculation errors => inability to /ever/ enjoy math if you have to go back and correct your arithmetic all the time. If you try to teach somebody derivatives and only make them do 10 problems of course it'll go in one ear out the other. People need to do 100s of problems and stop watching TV or having fun/lives - what are those? Math rant over and out.
The idea that American kids are "being robbed of their childhoods" is ridiculous. If anything sucks away your childhood it has gotta be the Internet/video games etc., or sex/parties if you're one of those those 8th graders who are already sexually active [for old people getting their knickers in a knot over this, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17453367/]. There is something wrong with 12 year olds hooking up instead of dying under the hw assigned by slavemaster teachers ^^ Booo save the children!
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