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This study evaluates the academic success of charter schools compared to the academic achievement of traditional public schools in the state of Georgia. The study introduces the history of charter schools in America and their impact on the American public education system in the years since the first charter school was launched in Minnesota in 1992. A detailed literature review contextualizes the debate over charter schools and their performance as compared to traditional public schools. The study conducts an evaluation utilizing the Framework for Academic Quality which is a tool specifically designed by the National Consensus panel on Charter School Academic Quality to evaluate and assess the performance of charter schools. The study addresses six research questions and adopts an ex post facto research design to conduct quantitative analysis. The collected data is analyzed and compared using a causal-comparative approach. For this study, data were collected from the Georgia Achievement test scores documented by the Georgia Department of Education. The data reported on the passing rates of Criterion Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) reading and math tests among 3rd and 5th graders during the study period did not seem to provide sufficient evidence to suggest any statistically significant difference between the academic performances of charter and public schools.
Since the 1980s publication "A Nation at Risk", policy makers have continually sought to improve America's education system by crafting education policies with strict guidelines. Recent policies like No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and now the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), are calling for increased accountability of school districts measured by standardized test scores. With the threat of losing funding and facing sanctions for failing to meet minimum College and Career Readiness Performance Index (CCRPI) requirements, school districts are continually looking for research-based strategies and reform models that promise to enhance student achievement. Researchers have examined various reform models and methods including schools-within-a-school, small learning communities, career academies, school choice, career pathways, and charter schools. Some studies have displayed successful increases in student achievement as a result of implementing these reforms individually. However, the results have not proven to be entirely reproducible as other researchers exhibit insignificant findings. This casual-comparative design compared career academy charter schools to traditional public schools that had implemented career academies. The independent variable was school type-charter school and public school. The dependent variables were Georgia End-of-Course Test scores in the areas of English Language Arts, math, and science. Using ANOVA analysis, significant findings on one out of three measures indicated that implementing career academies at charter schools increased student achievement in science more than the implementation at public schools. The implementation did not positively or negatively impact ELA scores or math. However, when grade level was incorporated as a covariate, ANCOVA analysis revealed that implementing career academies at public schools significantly impacted student achievement in math compared to the charter site. The analysis also revealed that as grade level increased, so did test scores. ANCOVA analysis of the science data indicated that career academy charter school students significantly outperformed the public school career academy students. However, no interaction effects were observed between grade level and test scores. ANCOVA did not impact the results in ELA.
Sponsored by the National Center on School Choice, a research consortium headed by Vanderbilt University, this volume examines the growth and outcomes of the charter school movement. Starting in 1992-93 when the nation’s first charter school was opened in Minneapolis, the movement has now spread to 40 states and the District of Columbia and by 2005-06 enrolled 1,040,536 students in 3,613 charter schools. The purpose of this volume is to help monitor this fast-growing movement by compiling, organizing and making available some of the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K-12 charter schools. Key features of this important new book include: Expertise – The National Center on School Choice includes internationally known scholars from the following institutions: Harvard University, Brown University, Stanford University, Brookings Institution, National Bureau of Economic Research and Northwest Evaluation Association. Cross-Disciplinary – The volume brings together material from related disciplines and methodologies that are associated with the individual and systemic effects of charter schools. Coherent Structure – Each section begins with a lengthy introduction that summarizes the themes and major findings of that section. A summarizing chapter by Mark Schneider, the Commissioner of the National Center on Educational Statistics, concludes the book. This volume is appropriate for researchers, instructors and graduate students in education policy programs and in political science and economics, as well as in-service administrators, policy makers, and providers.
As charter schools enter their third decade, research in this key sector remains overwhelmingly contradictory and confused. Many studies are narrowly focused; some do not meet the standards for high-quality academic research. In this definitive work, Wohlstetter and her colleagues isolate and distill the high-quality research on charter schools to identify the contextual and operational factors that influence these schools’ performances. The authors examine the track record of the charter sector in light of the wide range of goals set for these schools in state authorizing legislation—at the classroom level, the level of the school community, and system-wide. In particular, they show how the evolution of the charter movement has shaped research questions and findings. By highlighting what we know about the conditions for success in charter schools, the authors make a significant contribution to current debates in policy and practice, both within the charter sector and in the larger landscape of public education.
As charter schools continue to proliferate across United States, their impact on the public education system is becoming an increasingly important public policy question. Charter school proponents argue that combined pressures of consumer choice and market competition will induce traditional public schools to respond by providing higher quality education and promoting innovation and equity. Skeptics worry that charter schools pose risks of segregating students by race and economic level, and reducing per-pupil resources available to traditional public schools. This dissertation provides a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of charter schools on regular public schools by addressing the following questions: 1) How do the charter schools affect the racial, ethnic and socio-economic distribution, student-teacher ratios and achievement of traditional public schools? 2) How do the size and scope of competitive effects vary according to different measures of competition? Using two-period panel data from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core Data (CCD) for traditional public schools in Florida, New Jersey, Texas and Ohio, I compare changes in racial and ethnic distribution, student-teacher ratios and achievement in public schools that do and do not face competition. I use a variation of the difference-in-differences (DD) estimation strategy to study the effect of charter schools on the outcome measures. The findings from the study suggest that introduction of charter schools in the educational landscape has affected student distributions, and at least in some cases, student-teacher ratios and the performance of traditional public schools. Charter schools seem to contribute to declines in the share of non-Hispanic white students in traditional public schools in all four states. The results show variation in other outcome areas across states and competition measures. The findings highlight the importance of monitoring what will happen to non-choosers in traditional schools as well as the role of considering state context and empirical measures while generalizing from charter school studies.
Charter schools now exist in 40 states, but the best charter-school studies to date have focused on individual states. This book examines charter schools in eight states with varied policy contexts. It assesses the characteristics of charter schools' students, their effectiveness in raising student achievement and promoting graduation and college entry, and their competitive effects on student achievement in traditional public schools.
This book breaks new ground on how policymakers and journalists can fairly assess charter school performance. The editors and authors show how good approaches to charter school assessment would also work for regular public schools, which is important because of the requirements of No Child Left Behind.
Moving beyond the debate over whether or not charter schools should exist, A Smarter Charter wrestles with the question of what kind of charter schools we should encourage. The authors begin by tracing the evolution of charter schools from Albert Shanker's original vision of giving teachers room to innovate while educating a diverse population of students, to today's charter schools where student segregation levels are even higher than in traditional public schools. In the second half of the book, the authors examine two key reforms currently seen in a small but growing number of charter schools, socioeconomic integration and teacher voice, that have the potential to improve performance and reshape the stereotypical image of what it means to be a charter school.
Charter schools are among the most debated and least understood phenomena in American education today. At the heart of these matters is a contested question of accountability. To survive, charter schools must make and keep promises about what students will experience and learn under their purview. However, unlike public schools, charter schools do not rely exclusively on their relationship with school districts. They must also look to parents, teachers, and donors to cooperatively establish expectations of a particular school and its mission. Aimed toward elected officials, school reform activists, and educators, this book is the result of the first national-scale study of charter school accountability. The authors researched one hundred-fifty schools and sixty authorizing agencies in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. These states contain the majority of charter schools that have been operating for three years or more and represent the major differences in state charter school legislation. The authors include interviews from a range of participants in the field©¡from state legislators and administrators to principals, teachers, and parents. In assessing the structure of accountability as it works internally to bolster external confidence, Hill and Lake suggest the struggle of charter schools actually complements those of standards based reform. Both seek to transform public education to make schools responsible for performance, not compliance.
During the 2008-09 school year, over 5,000 charter schools operated in 40 states and Washington, D.C. and were attended by over 1.5 million students, or about three percent of the nation's public school students. Although the first U.S. charter schools opened in 1992, debate continues over whether they provide students with a better education than traditional public schools. This Information Capsule reviews studies that compared the achievement of students attending charter and traditional public schools and found mixed results. Most studies have found that charter schools produce achievement gains that are about the same or lower than those found in traditional public schools, although a few studies have concluded that charter schools have a positive effect on student achievement. These inconsistent findings have led some researchers to conclude that the rapid growth of the charter school movement has significantly outpaced the evidence supporting its impact on student achievement. Because there is such wide variation from state to state in charter schools' mission, funding, student populations, size, grade level coverage, and independence from regulations and teacher contracts, there may never be a single definitive study that determines if charter or traditional public schools provide students with better learning opportunities. This Information Capsule also reviews research comparing the qualifications of teachers at charter schools and traditional public schools and student segregation in charter schools. Most studies have found that charter school teachers have less teaching experience than teachers at traditional public schools. In addition, charter schools appear to intensify racial and economic segregation. Finally, information on charter schools operating within the state of Florida and in Miami-Dade County is provided. A more comprehensive Literature Review on charter school research is available at Research Services' Web site (http://drs.dadeschools.net). The Literature Review also summarizes research conducted in the following areas: student achievement at new versus more established charter schools; student achievement at conversion versus start-up charter schools; student mobility at charter schools; charter school teacher attrition rates; demographic characteristics of students attending charter schools; and the impact of charter school competition on the achievement of students remaining in traditional public schools. (Contains 4 tables.).