The Charter School Dust-Up

In the heated debate over charter schools, advocates insist charters are a beneficial alternative that especially helps economically disadvantaged students, while critics doubt these touted achievements. This new book, co-published by the Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, sheds much-needed light on the effectiveness of charter schools by analyzing current research and data to show how they perform compared to regular public schools. The Charter School Dust-Up looks at national data and studies in 13 states to investigate charter school enrollment and achievement.

Debates spurred by federal charter school test data show how all debates about education could be improved: by carefully accounting for the difficulty of educating particular groups of students before interpreting test scores, and by focusing on student gains, not their level of achievement at any particular time.

Martin Carnoy is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and professor of education and economics at Stanford University. Rebecca Jacobsen is a research assistant at the Economic Policy Institute, a graduate student in politics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and formerly a teacher in New York City and Connecticut public schools. Lawrence Mishel is president of the Economic Policy Institute and director of its education research and policy program. Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a visiting professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“The right wing continues to push (and finance) biased studies to ‘prove’ that charter schools outperform regular public schools. This book provides a much-needed antidote, examining in detail the racial and class composition of charter schools throughout the country and the performance of those schools compared to public schools using various measures.”

— Rethinking Schools