Guidelines Offered for Meaningful Studies of Achievement in Charters

Washington

A national panel is raising concerns about the quality of much of the research to date on charter school achievement, and has outlined recommendations to help ensure better analyses in the future.

The first in a series of white papers from the group of researchers, issued May 31, notes that while the volume of research on student performance in charters has grown dramatically, the actual quality of that research doesn’t seem to be improving.

“It’s actually fairly discouraging,” Julian Betts, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, said at a...