UPDATE: Stanford charter school study

Earlier I wrote about this CREDO report on the effectiveness of charter schools in Michigan, with the headline, "Charter Schools More Effective."  Today my MEA e-newsletter sent me this gem from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research, which links to a review of the study by somebody else.  (I believe this is why people refer to the self-sustaining nature of bureaucracy.)  That person, one Andrew Maul of U Colorado Boulder, writing for the Think Twice Project (not a project I'm familiar with), suggests that there is almost no difference in performance between charter school students and public education students.  The effect of charter schools was responsible for a performance improvement of .1%, considerably less than the effect of having a teacher that knows how to use compare-and-contrast charts effectively.

Caveat lector: I still have not read the original CREDO study, nor have I read the full Maul report.  I pass this along as a summary of news, not as a position.  However, clearly this new summary of other people's research matches more neatly with my biases than the summary of the original report.

Stanford: MI charter schools more effective

Just a quick note to promise more analysis later.  I am against charter schools for a wide variety of reasons.  One of them was, until this afternoon, that all evidence indicated that charter schools are less effective than public schools.  This afternoon, I saw a report released today by Stanford University (download page here; click on Michigan).  The conclusion they draw is that Michigan charter schools produce better educational outcomes in students than comparable public schools.  I clearly have my doubts, but it seems likely that the researchers at Stanford would have taken these into account.  More from me after I actually read the report.  I mostly didn't want to feel like I'd neglected information I find inconvenient.