Is the FLDOE Charter School Study to be believed?

In case you missed it, the FLDOE put out a study confirming what corporate reformers and the FLDOE itself has known all along and that’s charter schools are great and public schools suck. Whew, glad that’s over. Except is it?

I have to tell you before the report came out, I thought it was inconceivable that charter schools would be doing better than public schools in any measure and that’s with selection bias, them counseling out low achievers and limiting the amount of disabled and English as a second language students they take but boy according to the FLDOE’s study was I wrong. They reported charter schools beat public schools in something like 83 out of 96 indicators.

But before we take our torches and pitchforks and head down to the local public school we should ask ourselves a few questions. Starting with, how is this possible? The CREDO, the gold standard of charter school studies says the vast majority of charter schools are no better or are worse than their public school counterparts. Yet somehow in Florida where 226 have failed in the last 13 years, including about a dozen in the last year and where any Tom, Dick or Harry with a knack for paperwork and a space bigger than a broom closet can start a charter school are charter schools blowing public schools away.

I also ask this question because even according to the FLDOE’s study, charter schools were five times as likely to be an F school and 91 percent of public schools were A, B or C schools and only 89 percent of charter schools were and that’s with 159 charter schools, a little over 30 percent of them, not receiving a grade at all.

Look I don’t want my answer to be right, I want the right answer but this study, done by an organization that is pro-charter and make no mistake the FLDOE run by charter advocates is pro charter, on its face seems unbelievable and that’s a big problem, or at least for me anyways.