Once again, the average performance composite score of charter schools beat the district school average.
The performance composite is the percentage of students’ scores in each school that were at or above grade level on state end-of-grade and end-of-course tests. Admittedly, I am not a fan of comparing average performance composites, but critics of charter schools have been doing it for years. So, let’s take a minute, play by their rules, and see what happens.
For the 2011-12 school year, the average performance composite for 99 charter schools was 80 percent (median = 83.7). The average performance composite for 2,294 district schools was 77.3 percent (median = 78.7). To be fair, I excluded all schools classified as “alternative” or “other” (89 schools) and those that did not have a performance composite (50 schools).
