A few years ago, the California Charter School Association revealed Golden State charter performance didn’t align to the usual bell-shaped curve, but instead was clustered at the highest- and lowest-performance levels, creating a U-shaped curve. The 2016 Building a Grad Nation Report, released this week by GradNation, suggests that the same is true for charter graduation rates nationally.
In a piece for Education Post, I highlight some of the limitations of the data and the gaps in alternative accountability understanding that have been going on for too long. Sorting through all these apples and oranges is essential if we want to focus our attention on the true set of charter high schools that are not performing at acceptable levels—those that should face stiff questioning at renewal time.
