California charter schools get "more bang for the buck" than traditional public schools and may be improving at a faster clip, according to a report scheduled for release today. Still, the charters continue to trail regular public schools in academic achievement and seem to have a tougher time teaching English to students who are learning it as a second language.
Despite the shortcomings, the report "suggests that charter schools are better able to increase student performance in a shorter period of time than non-charter public schools," said its principal author, Priscilla Wohlstetter, a professor of education policy and director of the Center on Educational Governance at USC. "We're talking about academic momentum."
Wohlstetter is presenting the report today at the annual meeting of the National Education Writers Assn. in Los Angeles.
Charter schools are independent, publicly funded elementary and secondary schools that operate outside the bureaucratic structure of traditional school districts. Although they still educate a relatively small percentage of children, their numbers have been growing explosively in California, especially in the area served by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
In the past, reports on charter schools have tended to find little evidence that they do a better job of educating children than traditional public schools, although reports in 2005 by the Charter Schools Assn. and The Times found that charters were improving in academic achievement faster than non-charters.
That was the conclusion of Wohlstetter's report, Charter Schools Indicators, which tried to find new and more insightful measures of school performance than those currently in use.
Rather than just looking at the results of standardized tests, the study attempted to gauge "academic momentum," to see if schools are getting better over time, and "school productivity," to see how their academic achievement relates to the amount of money they spend.
Academic momentum was gauged only over a single school year, which could raise questions about whether it is subject to year-to-year fluctuations. Gauging schools by financial outlay -- what Wohlstetter referred to as "bang for the buck" -- thrusts the study into a long-running debate about whether it makes sense to judge schools by corporate models of productivity.
