Chesterton Tribune                                                                                   Adv.

ISTEP results: Charter Schools failing to measure up?

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By VICKI URBANIK

As Indiana forges ahead with a plan that could make it the most charter school friendly state in the country, some school officials are pointing to testing results that they say show that charter schools don’t always make the grade.

Duneland Superintendent Dirk Baer cited a statewide ranking of ISTEP scores that found that some of the lowest results among third graders statewide were from charter schools.

“What are we really accomplishing by siphoning off the funding for public schools if that’s their performance level?” Baer said. “To me it makes no logic.”

Indiana State Teachers Association President Nate Schnellenberger offered different statistics: Of the top 100 performing schools on ISTEP in all grade levels, only one was a charter school. And of the 50 worst ISTEP scores, 31 came from charter schools.

“The idea that charter schools are some panacea ... simply is not true,” he said.

Independently, the Chesterton Tribune reviewed charter school ISTEP scores from the latest round of testing last spring. Among the various grade levels, 60 to 75 percent of charter schools’ results were below state average in both the English/language arts and math portions of ISTEP test.

(The local charter school, Discovery, is not included in the results, since the school opened this school year and did not take ISTEP tests last spring).

But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.

Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.

If a relatively new charter school posts low ISTEP results, “is that a failing school? No.” He cited one charter school with high ISTEP scores and noted that when it first opened, it also had low ISTEP scores.

But Schnellenberger said fair or not, traditional public schools in Indiana are in fact judged by their ISTEP scores; if regular public schools are compared to the state average, then it’s only fitting that charter schools are held up to the same expectation.

Indiana currently has about 60 charter schools. All charter schools in Indiana require a sponsoring agency, and more than half -- 35 -- are sponsored by Ball State University, according to information posted on the Indiana Department of Education’s website. Another 21 are sponsored by the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office. The remaining sponsors are the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation and the Lafayette School Corporation.

A proposal moving forward in the Indiana Legislature would set the stage for an “unfettered expansion” of charter schools in Indiana, Schnellenberger said. The bill, HB 1002, would allow more sponsors of charter schools, including mayors of second class cities and certain private colleges and universities.

Baer said other proposals that have surfaced would require traditional public schools to lease facilities to charter schools for a nominal fee of $1 or to set aside part of their property tax funded Capital Projects Fund and transportation funds for charter schools. HB 1002 includes a provision that would require public schools to divert their transportation funds for charter schools, unless the public school provides transportation for the charter students.

Schnellenberger said ISTA’s position is that at a time when funding for existing public schools is diminishing, focusing on charter schools is the wrong way to go.

“To me, it’s more about privatizing public education than anything else,” he said.

Baer agrees. By redirecting state education dollars away from established public schools and towards new charter schools creates an “almost self-fulfilling prophecy” by denying public schools all the resources they need.

“To me that’s privatizing the schools. It makes no sense,” he said.

Baer said proposals to cater to charter schools don’t improve public education. If the state adequately funded public schools, then he said perhaps the state could consider expanding charters. But as it is right now, charter schools have funneled away state funding from public schools; for Duneland, the loss was about $600,000 after the new Discovery Charter opened, he said.

“It makes it difficult when we’re scraping for dollars,” Baer said.

But Simnick said unlike public schools, charter schools have been shut down because of poor performance. He said he challenges anyone to show when a public school that wasn’t performing well was forced to close. “I don’t want charter schools to stay open if they aren’t serving kids,” he said.

ISTEP Charter Scores

The following is a breakdown of how Indiana’s charter schools peformed on the 2010 ISTEP tests, based on online data. The results are for the English/language arts and math portions of the test ony. “Passing” refers to the total percent of students who passed, whether they passed or acheived pass-plus status.

Third Grade: State average for passing English was 79 percent. Of 36 charter schools with available data, 27 were below state average, three were at the average, and six were above average. State average for passing math was 75 percent; 28 schools were below state average, one was at average, and seven were above average.

Overall, 69 percent of the charter schools were below state average in both English and math.

Fourth Grade: State average for passing English was 77 percent. Of the 36 charter schools with available data, 29 were below state average, and seven were above. State average for passing math was 75 percent; 32 schools were below the math average, one was at the average, and three were above average.

Overall, 75 percent of the charter schools were below state average in both English and math.

Fifth Grade: State average for passing English was 71 percent. Of the 38 charter schools with available data for 5th grade, 33 were below state average, two were at average, and three were above average. State average for passing math was 80 percent; 34 schools were below average, and four were above.

Overall, 79 percent of the charter schools were below state average in both English and math.

Sixth Grade: State average for passing English was 72 percent. Of the 35 charter schools with available data for 6th grade, 25 were below state average, and 10 were above average. State average for passing math was 77 percent; 25 schools were below the math average and 10 were above.

Overall, 60 percent of the charter school sixth graders were below state average in both English and math.

Seventh Grade: State average for passing English in seventh grade was 72 percent. Of the 27 charter schools with available data, 21 were below state average, and six were above average. State average for passing math in seventh grade was 73 percent; 20 schools were below state average and seven were above.

Overall, 67 percent of the charter school seventh graders were below state average in both English and math.

Eighth Grade: State average for passing English in eighth grade was 69 percent. Of the 23 charter schools with available data, 20 were below state average and three were above. State average for passing math in eighth grade was 72 percent; 18 schools were below the math average and five were above.

Overall, 74 percent of the charter school eighth grade were below state average in both English and math.

The above statistics do not include the ISTEP scores from a virtual pilot charter school, where all grades posted ISTEP scores below the state average.

 

 

Posted 2/14/2011

 

 

 

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