Coalition notes charters' achievements, challenges

Students in Colorado charter schools perform better than their peers in non-charter public schools, but the schools themselves have room to improve, according to a report released Monday by a national coalition of charter school leaders.

“This is just a step to improvement in charter school quality across the country,” said Jim Griffin, CEO of the Colorado League of Charter Schools, a nonprofit, membership organization that supports charter schools in the state. “We’re trying to capture what works and what doesn’t.”

Colorado’s charter schools outperformed the state’s noncharter public schools in the percentage of schools that made Adequate Yearly Progress in 2009, according to the report.

AYP is how the federal government holds schools, districts and states accountable under the No Child Left Behind Act, which has a goal that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Eighty-five percent of Colorado charter elementary schools made AYP, compared with 73 percent of noncharter public elementary schools. At the middle school level, 81 percent of charter schools made AYP, compared with 49 percent of noncharter public schools. The gap was much smaller between charter and noncharter public high schools, 36 percent to 34 percent.

Charter schools also had consistently higher scores across grades and subjects in Colorado Student Assessment Program tests.

The report, “Building Charter School Quality in Colorado,” covers the state’s charter movement, including guidelines and recommendations for how the state and entities that authorize charter schools, including school districts, can continue to improve and strengthen charter schools.

This is the first time Colorado schools have been held up against national standards for noncharter public schools in Colorado, Griffin said. Several other states, including Ohio, Arizona and New Mexico, were also the focus of state reports.

The bulk of the information will be more helpful to lawmakers and districts than to individual schools, Griffin said, but the report will help districts looking to authorize charter schools or renew contracts. It suggests districts take a more active role in overseeing charter schools, providing an annual written review and other regular feedback.

In Colorado, 163 charter schools serve about 70,000 students. The state has been at the forefront of the charter school movement since adopting a law in 1993 regulating the creation of charter schools. The nation’s first charter school had opened just the previous year in Minnesota.

The report credits the state not only for charter school improvements, but also changes to general education, including adopting ways to track students’ growth over time.

It will take work to translate the report’s findings into practice and policy, Griffin said, but there is interest for collaborative improvement.

The report, which spans four years of charter school work, is from the federally funded Building Charter School Quality coalition, which includes the Colorado League of Charter Schools, Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.