by Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, Richard Rothstein
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Product Description
In the heated debate over charter schools, advocates insist charters are a beneficial alternative that especially helps economically disadvantaged students, while critics doubt these touted achievements. This new book, co-published by the Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, sheds much-needed light on the effectiveness of charter schools by analyzing current research and data to show how they perform compared to regular public schools. The Charter School Dust-Up looks at national data and studies in 13 states to investigate charter school enrollment and achievement. Debates spurred by federal charter school test data show how all debates about education could be improved: by carefully accounting for the difficulty of educating particular groups of students before interpreting test scores, and by focusing on student gains, not their level of achievement at any particular time.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Somewhat informative, but the book feels very one-sided and dated., 2008-05-04
I saw this book as a assigned book for a college course and even when this book came out it was already dated. Harvard University did a study back in '04 before the copyright on this book on the topic of charter schools and their performance relative to the local schools with similar demographics and came up with completely different results showing in most cases charters did better than the local school with similar racial makeup performed.
The authors of this book base their assertion that charter schools are unsuccessful relative to regular public schools based upon an AFT study, which only sampled ~3% of charter school students. Havard Professor Caroline Hoxby's study used data from schools that represented close to 99% of students enrolled in a charter school. Unless you can discredit the methodology of Hoxby's study, I tend to find AFT study the less accurate of the two. The only criticism I have found of Hoxby's study is from... the AFT. Surprise, surprise. Their criticism doesn't question the methodology at all, but dwells on a lot of tangential criticism of "charter school cheerleaders."
Unfortunately as far as I can see this book doesn't properly acknowledge conflicting viewpoints. Mainstream charter school supporters like Jeanne Allen of CER are called "charter school zealots." A good chunk of the book is spent on trying to discredit arguments in defense of charter schools. Having to defend charter schools must be predicated upon the questionable notion that they are doing significantly worse than competing public schools. Even then, some of their arguments seem questionable to say the least.
The book isn't completely worthless. It does make a few good criticisms about how few charter schools up to that point had closed for academic reasons for example, but the things that this book does well are far overshadowed by one sided coverage of this controversial topic and by some of mistakes in relying upon the AFT study, which considering the sponsor should have been taken with a grain of salt to anyone even without looking at other studies on the same topic.
I looked around for a volume that looks at charter schools that tells the good, the bad and the ugly, but this book isn't it. The authors of this book seem to be writing a book to sell to AFT members who want a validation of their beliefs, not to someone who wants to look at a large mix of evidence and see how the cards fall.
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 Apologists for public schools get an "F" in research., 2006-09-21
It is typical of our marginally educated educators in this country to bungle their research. Carnoy's book is an example. They make absolute comparisions of student proficiencies after controlling for the some of the demographic and socio-economic effects but in so doing they leave out the most important factor of all: How did the students compare with their regular public school cohorts when they entered charter schools? Perhaps lost to these ed-researchers is the fact that charter schools attract low performers compared to the public school alternatives. The real measure of a quality school is not children's absolute performance, but how much do they improve year over year. On that measure, charter schools are signficantly superior to their regular public school counterparts.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 informative study on charter schools, 2005-08-03
Copious, detailed statistics and related material represented in the book's many tables finds that despite the claims of charter schools' advocates and some success stories, there is no meaningful difference between charter schools and public schools. "[C]harter schools are not, and likely will not be, able to play a large role in reforming public education as a whole." The four authors are all academics in the overlapping areas of economics and education belonging to the Institute publishing this timely study that is associated with Teachers College, Columbia U. The Bush Administration's program "No Child Left Behind" is scrutinized in one chapter in light of the findings recorded here. Recommendations for more relevant standards for measuring and judging the performance of students and schools are put forth as well mostly in appendices. An up-to-date, sound, and with respect to some central education questions, definitive report for educators, administrators, and policy makers.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Walking an Educational Tightrope, 2005-04-22
When The New York Times printed a front-page story in the summer of 2004 about the inferior performance on average of charter schools compared with regular public schools, it unleashed a controversy that has still not died down. The Times's reportage was based on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that the American Federation of Teachers had first published.
Against this backdrop, Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein have written "The Charter School Dust-Up." The intent was to examine as comprehensively as possible all the available evidence. The result is the most penetrating study of the charter school movement to date.
What emerges is a model of how to keep one's cool when things get hot. The authors demonstrate a masterful ability to delve into the heated charges made by both sides of the issue and to maintain their objectivity at all times. Their provocative conclusions will provide fodder for many op-ed pieces on both sides of the subject and will form the starting point for further research.
This book is a must read for everyone concerned about the future course of public education in this country.
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