However, data is in short supply. Esp. clear, unambiguous data.
It's the same with pretty much all ed research. Very little research uses control groups with randomly sorted students. You get lots of studies with short-term effects or which aren't replicatable. Lots of studies that are poorly designed or which use poorly defined terms. Lots of studies with one variable under the microscope but where the researchers change several things--and are so unaware that they mention other things they've changed in passing.
Charter school research is among the worst. Charter School X may be characterized in a certain way, but it's an incomplete characterization. Not wrong. Just not quite right. Or it'll be compared to a public school (or another charter school) that's not properly characterized. The worst is mixing fiction and reality, looking at what one school says it does or using outdated data and looking at the other school's present reality. Another problem is looking at funding. "Charter school gets X results but spends less money" (or "more money", depending upon whether you include bond funds in the public school's ed expenses).
I look at the research, listen to people talk, and they may as well not even quote the research. They pick and choose research that's already picked and chosen their terms and data to support the conclusions they want to reach.
A lot of times you find averages used for one school versus specific examples for another school.
I think some charter schools do better than public schools serving the same community. I think this sometimes makes the public schools do worse. I think many charter schools are places where kids are warehoused for various reasons or money machines for their founders and the groups running them (or both). I think many public schools are viewed by parents as cheap daycare, and, in fact, the public schools are little more than cheap daycare.
I think that many view the entire public/charter school issue as a war on unions. I also think this is a foolish argument.
It's about the kids. As soon as either side tries to make it an argument about the unions or politics, we've said that our kids are pawns.
The NEA said this decades back. As soon as the other side agrees, we've all agreed that our kids are pawns. Now we're working on figuring out what to sacrifice pawns for. Petty.
Politicians decided decades before the NEA made it all about the unions that it was all about politics, however. At that point the entire "union" debate that would follow was already rendered unimportant.
Public ed is broken. Badly broken. Everybody has their pet causes that they've decided a priori must be the deciding factor in the breakage. This includes researchers and is the reason we can't get clean, clear data. Hell, we aren't allowed to pose some questions or consider some possible hypotheses (and it doesn't matter if a lot of the data we do have seems to hint at these possible hypotheses).
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