Charter school evaluation flawed

Charter school evaluation flawed

The plan to assess whether charter schools are working will not look at the impact the schools are having and will be largely worthless, says PPTA President, Angela Roberts.

Charter schools, according to the Act-National Confidence and Supply Agreement which set them up, are supposed to “lift educational achievement in disadvantaged communities”.

“The evaluation won’t look at the impact on educational achievement in the area and for surrounding schools. This is a massive oversight.”

“If students in charter schools are doing well, but taking students who would have been achieving anyway, then there is no overall lift and it’s a policy fail.”

High quality charter school evaluations overseas use methods to compare the achievement of students in charters with how they would have been expected to perform had they stayed in public schools.

The Ministry’s plan states “Ideally, we would assess impact (i.e. the extent to which outcomes are attributable to the policy) through an experimental or quasi-experimental approach”.

However, it claims that using these approaches is “not practical” or “not possible” for this evaluation.

“This is a half-hearted attempt to be seen to be meeting the obligation that they have to assess whether this controversial policy is working,” says Roberts. “They are spending less than 1% of the cost of what is supposedly a pilot on evaluating it, and are getting what they are paying for, a cheap and shoddy exercise.”

“This government prides itself on evidence based policy. This evaluation won’t provide any useful evidence at all,” says Roberts.

The charter school evaluation plan is available from http://goo.gl/GJkAsX

ENDS

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