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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

At this point nothing the FLDOE puts out about public education can be taken seriously: charter school edition

Have you ever noticed that when the state puts out a study about vouchers they always immediately include, “when compared to students of the same socioeconomic group”? They do so because they know if they were to compare all students that took vouchers to those that did not, everyone would want to get rid of vouchers. It would work against the narrative that the state wants to sell.
Well friends it’s the same things when the state puts out studies about charter schools. You see when they do so, now they don’t care about the socio economic status of children at all, it doesn't matter one bit and that is because here, that data wouldn’t fit with their narrative either.
From the Florida Phoenix,
FL’s charter schools for the most part perform better than traditional public schools when it comes to test scores on state exams, according to a Florida Department of Education report released Monday.
But the analysis also shows that traditional public schools have higher percentages of students in poverty.
Why is that important? Poverty – meaning kids eligible for free and reduced-price lunch – has long been a key indicator of achievement, with low-income students posting lower test scores than more affluent peers.
The report shows that 65 percent of students in traditional public schools are eligible for free and reduced lunch, compared to 54.9 percent for charters schools.
In addition, Hispanic kids make up 42.3 percent of the charter school population compared to 32.5 percent in traditional public schools. And traditional public schools have higher percentages of special needs students compared to charter schools. Those kinds of factors can impact test scores.
Poverty as everyone but the republicans in Tallahassee know is the number one factor when determining success in school, quite simply, as a group those students in poverty don’t do as well as those students who aren’t.
If we were to add ten percent to every score public schools received in the study Public schools would dominate private schools, not that other factors don’t influence the outcome.
Things like selection bias, charters picking who they take but more importantly who they keep, as well as the fact more and more of them have opened in affluent parts of town where poverty is less come to mind and are things the study doesn’t even begin to address.
So why no socioeconomic comparisons? We know they are capable of them. Well friends it's because they want to spin whatever they can to help their narrative that charters (and vouchers) are good and public schools are bad.   
Are there some great charters that do things the right way? Sure I imagine so, but the reality is how Florida does charters, a hodge-podge of mom and pops and corporate mercenaries looking to make a profit with both groups more and more avoiding poor kids as much as they can is an abomination and does us all a disservice. It’s a shame friends that at this point nothing the FLDOE puts out about education can be taken seriously and I think I proved so in the first two paragraphs above.

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