Charter Schools Outperforming Districts On MCAS
The Boston Herald
September 21, 2002
By Ed Hayward
The state's charter schools boasted a greater number of improved scores on the spring MCAS exam, with more and more of the privately run schools scoring higher than their home districts.The most highly touted success stories included the River Valley Charter School in Newburyport and the Hilltown Cooperative Charter in Williamsburg, which outperformed all other school districts on the seventh-grade English exam, according to a Herald analysis. Lawrence Community Day Charter, located in one of the state's most educationally disadvantaged cities, ranked fourth on the eighth-grade math exam, the Herald found.
"The more established schools have been around for eight years," said Community Day Principal Sheila Balboni, who also serves as president of the Massachusetts Charter School Association. "We are beginning to gain some momentum. Students are with us longer. The longer they are with us, the better their scores are."
An analysis by the association pointed to other gains by charters, which were rocked earlier this year by a Brookings Institute report that found charter-school students perform below their public school counterparts.In sixth grade, 17 of 27 charter schools scored higher than students in the districts where the schools are located. In seventh grade, 20 of 28 charter schools scored higher than their home districts. In eighth grade, 15 of 25 charter schools scored higher than their districts.In 10th grade, nine of 13 charter schools scored higher than their home districts, with scores averaging 8.8 points more than the mainstream schools.
Critics of charter schools, which receive per-pupil funding from the school budgets of the districts where their students live, remained skeptical about the scoring gains. Paul Dunphy, of Citizens for Public Schools, said charter-school testing groups are typically much smaller than the average mainstream class - a few dozen students compared to a few hundred - and that charters don't educate as many minorities or special-needs students. "The range of students in charters tend to be much narrower than the broad cross-section served by public schools," said Dunphy. "If anything, charter school scores raise concerns about whether these schools are drawing needed resources from the public system and creaming off academically successful kids."
But at the Media and Technology Charter High School in Boston, officials said their students defied the odds for low-income and black and Hispanic students. The 50 MATCH students who took the 10th-grade exam last spring completely turned around their performance since they took the eighth-grade exams. Of the group, 82 percent had failed their eighth-grade math or English MCAS, said Alan Safran, executive director of the 3-year-old school. Last spring, 80 percent of the group passed the math exam and 94 percent passed English. Principal Charles Sposato attributed the gains to a vigilant focus on reading and writing - even in math and science topics. In addition, students commit to spending an extra eight hours a week attending tutoring or extra help sessions after school or on weekends. "Kids learn to read by reading, so we have them reading at every opportunity," said Sposato, a 30-year veteran educator. "Kids learn to write by writing, so they write at every opportunity."
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