Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert throw a little cold water on the charter school parade in their latest article for Newsweek. They note that a Stanford study shows 17 percent of charters perform significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent produce academic results worse than traditional public schools.
I?ll leave analysis of the Stanford study to others and assume for this blog entry that the results are accurate. If so, those results don?t necessarily lead in the direction Thomas and Wingert point.
They suggest that these numbers prove charters are no ?runaway success story.? OK. If you?ve read Thomas Sowell?s Intellectuals and Society, you might recognize this as an example of a common critique used by the advocates of government-centric solutions: Point out that a policy you oppose is no panacea.
As Sowell notes, this type of critique rebuts an argument that no one has made. Plus the ?no panacea? argument avoids the real questions: Is the policy effective given time or cost constraints? Does it work better than other policies?
In this case, important questions to answer include: Do charter schools work better for some students than traditional public schools? Do charter schools permit testing of pedagogical methods that are omitted from traditional public schools?
And here?s a line of questioning Thomas and Wingert ignore completely: Do charter schools provide a better ? or at least comparable ? education at a lower cost to taxpayers? Does a combination of traditional and charter schools create a bigger bang for the tax buck?
