Colorado charter schools were more likely than traditional schools to improve their year-to-year rankings on the School Accountability Reports, according to a Denver Post analysis.
Among the state’s 1,617 traditional schools and programs, about 12 percent boosted state report card scores from 2004 to 2005. Among the 183 charter schools, roughly 22 percent of them had a better ranking this year than last.
Charter schools also were more apt to have received the top “excellent” ranking – and more apt to have received the bottom “unsatisfactory” ranking – than traditional schools.
Those numbers indicate that just being a charter school does not necessarily make the school successful.
“It’s not good to make broad generalizations,” said Andrew Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan, Washington-based think tank. “There are plenty of examples of schools with flexibility that are doing a God-awful job.”
Charter schools receive taxpayer dollars and are considered public schools, yet they are run privately and are not subject to district rules and curriculum.
At P.S. 1 Charter in central Denver, students raised their ranking from last year’s “unsatisfactory” to this year’s “low.”
Principal Liz Aybar, who started her job this fall, attributes the boost to getting more P.S. 1 students to take Colorado Student Assessment Program tests.
“We used to have a lot of no-scores,” she said. “They mobilized the community around actually taking it, and scores improved.”
Now, Aybar hopes to use the standards, reading, writing and math, to get students at her grades 6-12 school interested in topics they’re passionate about.
Take senior Matt Struck, who is writing, directing and editing a film for his senior project.
“Since I care about it, the quality of work is so much higher,” Struck said Tuesday. “It forces me to be responsible for it.”
Rotherham said charter schools can quickly boost student achievement because they have freedom from district regulations about length of school day, and class structure.
Some successful charter schools, for example, have class on Saturdays and in the summer.
