AK: No, Alaskan Charters Don't Lead The Nation

Alaska's Mike Dunleavy is one more governor who really wants to cut into his state's public education sector. Lately he's been publishing editorials to boost the idea of expanding the charter sector in Alaska, making claims such as calling Alaska charter schools "the envy of the nation" and claiming they can boast being Number 1. 

The numbers don’t lie: Alaska’s charter schools consistently outperform traditional public schools in academic achievement, parental satisfaction and student engagement.

Except that's not true.  

Dunleavy is basing his claims on this report from Paul Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel in the Journal of School Choice (a real legitimate academic journal and certainly not a clearing house for advocacy masqu3erading as real academic research). Shakeel is a UK professor who has co-published reports with choice luminaries like Robert Maranto, Patrick Wolf, and Corey DeAngelis. Paul Peterson, of the Harvard Kennedy School, has made a career out of producing research that supports charter and voucher programs (Josh Cowen covers him extensively in The Privateers).

We could talk about how the report was commissioned by the Walton Foundation in order to buttress the case for charter schools, and I would love to talk about how it depends on scores from the Big Standardized Test to make its claims. But here's the thing about the Peterson/Shakeel report-- it doesn't even say what Dunleavy says it says.

Public schools do not appear anywhere in the paper, which is strictly a state by state comparison of charter school performance on the NAEP (the "gold standard" of national B S Tests). There are seven tables that rank states; Alaska is first in only two of them. 

In January, Beth Zirbes and Mike Bronson wrote a paper that further debunks Dunleavy's claims. Zirbes has a masters degree in both mathematics and statistics, and teaches high school math and statistics. Bronson holds a doctorate in biology and volunteers with the Anchorage NAACP, and their analysis is simple and clear. "Student achievement" has very little to do with charter vs. public school and everything to do socioeconomic status. And if you like visuals, Zirbes and Bronson drew a picture:

The authors found that charter schools on average "have very different student bodies than neighborhood schools." Charters had proportionately fewer poor students and English language learners. In fact, they found "Alaska charter school student bodies look like private schools in the Lower 48 states more than they resemble charter school students in the Lower 48"-- Alaska charter students are richer and whiter than charter students in the Lower 48. 

In 2019, just 3.5% of neighborhood schools in Alaska had fewer than 20% rates of economically disadvantaged students. Almost half of charter schools had below 20%. Only three of Alaska's twenty-eight charters enroll more than 10% of their student body from the ranks of English language learners. 157 of the state's neighborhood schools were above 10%. 

Zirbes and Bronson also note that the Peterson could not share what actual samples were used for his study. Nor does his study allow for the fact that Alaska's charter population is self-selecting, and no sort of control group was involved. 

Bottom line, once again-- controlling for the characteristics of the students involved, there is no evidence that charter schools do anything better than public schools, other than selecting higher-performing students.