In the South Park clip above Cartman takes on a Glenn Beck like persona after being given the responsibility of making the morning announcements.  In the course of the episode Cartman makes many outrageous declarative statements in the guise of questions. Is Wendy Testaburger using your lunch money to buy heroin? How can we know? Cartman claims to be just like other kids except he is brave enough to asks questions.

In his own Beck-like (or Cartman-like) moment, last week U of A Professor Paul Hewitt was brave enough to ask some important questions about charter schools in this Arkansas Times article.  He opens the article with a flourish of questions.

In the popular 1989 movie “Lean on Me,” about a Paterson, N.J., ghetto high school, Principal Joe Clark has all the troublemakers and under-performing students gather on the stage and he then kicks them all out of the school. With only the most serious students remaining, he restores his high school to its once proud position.

The movie, based on a real life situation, reflects pure fiction. Or does it? Is it possible to exclude the undesirable students and just skim off the best students to make elite, selective and even racially segregated schools? Can we, under current law, develop one school system for the “haves” and another system for the “have nots?” If you think this isn’t possible, just look carefully at the charter school movement and its more extreme sibling, voucher schools.

In this introductory paragraph Prof. Hewitt poses some relevant and substantive questions: Are charter schools creaming the best students?  Are charters leading to greater segregation economically or racially?  The problem with Hewitt’s questions, like Cartman’s, is that he primarily indicts by asking questions without really examining the evidence to answer them.

We do not have to wonder about the answers to these questions.  There is a fairly extensive literature that Hewitt fails to address or even acknowledge. Here is some evidence on whether charters cream taken from one of Stuart Buck’s old posts.

Parents whose children are doing well in the public schools often tend to stay put, while it is precisely the parents whose children are struggling who may tend to seek alternative schools (whether through vouchers or charters). Painting with a broad brush, many charter school and voucher parents have said, “Gee, little Johnny isn’t doing so well, maybe I should check into a different school.” Such “motivation” doesn’t give rise to some sort of huge charter school advantage.

Some evidence for this point: Zimmer et al.’s October 2009 paper analyzing data from locations representing 45% of the charter schools in the nation. They find NO evidence that charter schools are cream-skimming. To the contrary, “in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages.”

On whether charters lead to great segregation, the best work (studies that use individual student data) on this question, such as that done by RAND in 2009, reveals that since charters generally locate in racially segregated urban areas, the students they attract come from relatively segregated traditional public schools.  In the end, as RAND tells us, students who move into charter schools generally choose schools with racial compositions similar to those of the traditional public schools they exited. My collegues and I have a piece in  the forthcoming summer issue of Education Next that finds a similar result with aggregate data .  Take a look at Brian’s post from earlier this week for a more detailed description of our article.

Hewitt never mentions any of this or other research on the questions he raises.  Instead, he offers information on two individual charter schools.  For example, Hewitt cites racial composition data for the LISA charter school in Little Rock and compares that to other surrounding schools to draw conclusions about the segregating nature of charter schools.

However, one data point does not constitute a pattern. Last fall the Office for Education Policy investigated the effect of charter schools on segregation in Little Rock using student level data, using information from all charter schools in the area, not just one. You can find it here. We have talked about this study many times before. Here is the money quote from the study.

…the majority of student transfers from LRSD traditional public schools to charter schools are actually resulting in students entering into more racially integrated learning environments. Over half of the white students that left above-average white schools enrolled in a charter school that was more integrated (with almost all white students that left integrated schools enrolling in similarly integrated schools). Further, minority students that leave above-average minority schools or well-integrated schools are enrolling in charter schools that are equally or more integrated than their previous school.

In other words, transfers to public charter schools have the net effect of both leaving traditional public schools more integrated as a result of the transfer, as well as increasing the level of integration at the schools they transfer to.

Prof. Hewitt continues with the rhetorical strategy of indicting by questions without examining evidence for answers when he suggests that charter schools discriminate against children with parents who don’t “truly care” or who don’t “monitor (their child’s) education.”

In Arkansas we call privately operated charter schools “open enrollment schools.” In reality, are these schools truly open enrollment? Does every child have an equal opportunity to enroll? The first ingredient is that the child must have a parent who truly cares and monitors his or her education. It is far less likely that children from an impoverished single-parent home will have a parent who is aware of the enrollment hoops they must jump through to enter a charter school. How about the child whose parents are drug addicted or don’t have the capability to enroll them in the charter school?

Are charter schools deriving additional revenue from selling heroin? How can we know?

Hewitt is not really making an argument with evidence by raising questions like this, he is just getting in touch with his inner-Cartman.

To answer these “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions — Of course, charter schools are open enrollment. Legally they must accept anyone who chooses to attend, and this opportunity is available to all. This is in stark contrast to traditional public schools where attendance is limited to geographic boundaries. Think about schools located in wealthy neighborhoods; they would also fail to be truly public schools by Prof. Hewitt’s standard.  The barriers to entry for these schools are much more difficult to overcome than those required to attend any charter school.  To attend one of these well-to-do public schools, you must first be able to afford housing in the wealthy neighborhood, and I guarantee you this is a much higher bar than any “enrollment hoops” at a charter school.

As an interesting thought experiment, let’s apply the claims made by Prof. Hewitt to traditional public schools.

First, do traditional public schools teach every child? NO. They can and do expel many students every year. Not to mention that in Little Rock, as in many other districts around the nation, we have created magnet schools explicitly designed to recruit only high-achieving students.

Second, does our current system of traditional public schools lead to racial and income segregation? YES. To attend a school you must, by-and-large, live within it’s attendance zone, and if you look at residential patterns in the U.S. you will find we do a pretty good job of segregating ourselves by both race and income. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then we should try to detach schooling from housing, which is precisely what charter schools do.

Later in the article we find Prof. Hewitt bemoaning the student turnover at KIPP saying:

The KIPP Delta College Preparatory Academy in Helena-West Helena reports, according to state Education Department figures, a “student loss” rate in the eighth and ninth grade that is between three and four times that of the Helena-West Helena School District. The “student loss” occurring at KIPP would be a scandal if it took place at a regular public school, but charter schools seem to remain under the radar when it comes to serious scrutiny. This process leaves the KIPP schools with only the most dedicated students and parents, while the rest go back to public schools.

In replicating Prof. Hewitt’s result I found out just how convenient it was that he limit his analysis to the 8th and 9th grades. If we include retention from the 7th grade in the student loss calculation, the story looks a lot better for KIPP.  KIPP has a student loss rate nearly 5 times lower than Helena, with a negative loss rate (or growth) of -1.6% while Helena has a positive loss rate of 0.4%.   Looking only at 8th and 9th grades is inappropriate because it emphasizes the student mobility that occurs between junior high and high school.  KIPP generally gains students, but at the 9th grade transition it loses some students to traditional high schools that offer more intra-mural athletics.

If you would like to replicate my analysis, I used enrollment data from the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 school years to complete this calculation, and you can find the data here. From what I can tell, Prof. Hewitt’s analysis (and my reanalysis) simply compares enrollment in a cohort from one grade to the next.

In the end Prof. Hewitt asks 11 “questions” in his piece.  He cites virtually none of the systematic research literature and offers only two school data points, one of which is incorrect.

It’s certainly important to raise these questions, but it is even more important to consider them carefully, making use of systematic evidence to answer them correctly .