Charter school research.

Has Education Next's confidence in charter schools as a promising school-reform strategy evaporated? It's hard to imagine another explanation for Marci Kanstoroom's preemptive strike against the major federal charter schools research study currently in the field ("Looking in the Wrong Place," from the editors, Fall 2005).

Kanstoroom is concerned that the study examines only students in middle school and excludes those in elementary schools. The reason for this decision is clear enough: because of the study's randomized field-trial design, the researchers needed to establish a baseline at the grade when students enter the charter school. Thus including elementary schools would mean studying, and testing, kindergartners. Because states don't test these young students, the researchers would have to do so themselves, which would add significantly to the cost of a study whose expenses already number in the multiple millions.

So what's wrong with examining middle schools? Kanstoroom's first argument is that they represent "only 20 percent" of the nation's 3,400 charter schools. But the proportion of students in middle schools is the same for regular public schools as for charter schools. By Kanstoroom's logic, we should never study regular middle schools either.

She also argues that "two studies appear to confirm that charter schools are most effective for students who enter at an early age." Set aside for a moment that these two studies, no matter how rigorous, can't come close to settling such an important policy question. What if Kanstoroom is right? Should state legislators amend their laws to outlaw all charters except those starting with kindergarten? Should we shut down every KIPP middle school in the country?

Kanstoroom is right that "no single study will ever tell us about all charter schools," and this federal effort is no exception. It's not perfect, and its designers faced tough choices and trade-offs. Still, it is the first-ever large-scale effort to apply randomized field trials to charter schools. We'll learn a lot from it; maybe even that middle-school charters can be effective, after all.

MICHAEL J. PETRILLI

Vice President

Thomas B. Fordham Foundation 

Marci Kanstoroom replies:

Mike Petrilli is, of course, correct that we are likely to learn a good deal about the effectiveness of charter middle schools from the study I criticized. But the study, which the U.S. Department of Education calls the "Evaluation of the Impact of Charter School Strategies," is the federal government's one and only multimillion-dollar effort to evaluate charter schooling as an innovation. Focusing this national evaluation on charter middle schools--which research already suggests are weaker than charter schools admitting younger students--is akin to reviewing a restaurant after sampling only its soups.