Ed Week: Nations Report Card Remains Fodder in Charter Debate

With the recent release of this year’s results from “the nation’s report card,” supporters and critics of charter schools have renewed their debate over charter students’ relative performance, even while acknowledging serious limitations in the data’s reliability.

Charter school students’ scores appeared to be lower in most categories on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests given this year to a national sample of 4th and 8th graders in reading and mathematics.

But average charter scores also closed most of the gap in 4th grade reading and narrowed it slightly in 4th grade math. That was enough for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a Washington-based pro-charter advocacy group, to hail the scores as evidence of “real progress for charter schools.”