Charter school opponents could almost be heard chortling after the first year of accountability grades were handed out earlier last month to Mississippi’s initial two charter schools.
Reimagine Prep drew a “D” on the state’s A-to-F scale, and Midtown Public Charter School an “F.”
See, the opponents said, we told you that charter schools were a mistake, taking public money from cash-strapped existing schools and putting it into these alternatives that would be no improvement.
Not so fast.
Although neither Jackson charter school has performed any miracles in one year, they haven’t done any worse — and probably better — than the majority of the 13 traditional public middle schools in the capital city.
Except for two schools (one graded A, the other B), most of the traditional public middle schools in Jackson are awful. Ten received F grades this year, and the other one got a D. In the F-rated schools, less than one out of seven students is proficient in reading or in math.
To do a precise performance comparison between the charter and traditional middle schools, you’d have to compare how students of like academic and socioeconomic backgrounds did on state tests. That comparison, by law, is required to be done by the end of the year by the state board that authorizes and oversees the charter schools.
The comparison will be important because anecdotally it appears that the vast majority of students who have enrolled in the charter schools were not top performers at their previous schools but were well behind grade level and trying to catch up.
What you can somewhat compare already, though, is how well students improved over the course of the 2015-16 academic year.
The state calculates “growth” rates for all students at a school and those who scored in the bottom 25 percent the year before. To get credit for growth, a student who is already proficient has to maintain proficiency, and those who are behind academically have to improve more than one grade level.
By those measures, one of the charters, Reimagine Prep, outshone everyone in math. Ninety-five percent of its lowest performers and 79 percent of all of its fifth- and sixth-graders met their growth targets — easily the best in both rankings of the 15 Jackson middle schools. Midtown was about the middle of the pack in math and reading growth.
Rachel Canter of Mississippi First, a nonprofit which advocated to bring charter schools to Mississippi, says to give these schools two more years before coming to any conclusions about them. She said one of the seminal studies on charter schools, first done by Stanford University researchers in 2009 and updated in 2013, shows that it takes three years of operation to have a solid feel for whether a charter school is on the right trajectory or not.
Complicating things this past year, not just for these two charter schools but for all the schools in the state, is that students were adapting to the third different set of statewide tests in three years. The grades for many Mississippi schools declined as their students were asked to meet rightfully tougher standards and as the schools lost the waiver that for the previous two years had allowed them to mask their actual performance.
Are charter schools the panacea for the state’s public education woes? Maybe not. But in some parts of the state — Jackson and many parts of the Delta, for certain — they definitely are worth giving a full and fair try. If anything, Mississippi, which was woefully late to charter schools, is still being cautious with this experiment in school choice. This year marked the opening of just the third charter school, all of them in the Jackson area.
Unlike with traditional schools, charters are not guaranteed life into perpetuity. The charter is for five years, and then the organization running the school has to come before the state Charter Authorizer Board and seek renewal for another five years. If the charter school isn’t meeting academic, organizational and financial benchmarks, it doesn’t get an extension.
A line in the sand that the authorizer board has already drawn is that any charter school that gets an F accountability grade from the state in the final year of its term won’t be renewed.
That’s admittedly not the highest standard in the world. The authorizer board should say that a school has to be at least operating at a C level after five years to continue. After all, what’s the point of charter schools if they are just as mediocre as the traditional ones from which they are supposed to provide families an escape?
But at least it’s a stronger do-or-die threat than that under which traditional schools operate.
