The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement.

The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement. Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein. (Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press.) School Choice: Doing It the Right Way Makes a Difference. The National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, Paul Hill, chair. (The Brookings Institution Press.)

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Charter schools are new, diverse, and subject to close scrutiny. That combination necessarily produces research findings that are preliminary, inconsistent, limited, and subject to error. Even the high-quality articles on charters in the research section of this issue of Education Next (see pp. 51-66) do not find common ground.

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To make sense of all the complexity, there is an ever-growing need for dispassionate summaries that give outsiders a sense of the overall picture while sifting the wheat from the chaff. In this regard, the National Commission report issued by the centrist Brookings Institution remains a good place to begin, despite the fact that it is a bit boring and dated (2003) by the standards of the fast-changing world of school choice.

A more recent contribution, by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, is quite otherwise, on the dispassion index, at least. Although charter schools, with all their diversity, have gathered support across the political and education spectrums, from phonics fanatics to Summerhill progressives, the senior authors of this work remain well-entrenched critics of choice. Instead of weighing evidence in the balance, they search for findings they want to believe. For example, the study devotes considerable space to a couple of unrepresentative schools as if they were characteristic of all charters, thereby ignoring the extraordinary diversity of a new world still searching for its identity. The Dust-Up authors also use error-ridden information about a child's food stamp eligibility to argue, unconvincingly, that charter schools tend to serve the better-off segment of the minority community.

Above all, an inordinate number of words and pages are devoted to laying out what is depicted as zealotry and inconsistency among other participants in the debate over school choice, as if that tells one anything about the schools themselves. Although the authors are to be applauded for wanting to hold charter schools accountable to high performance standards, that does not save Dust-Up from being best assigned to the dustbin.