January 6, 2009 Study offers progress report on alternative education Play video

(Peter Howe, NECN) It's been 15 years since Massachusetts education officials launched "charter schools" as an education reform measure, schools that are independent of teacher unions and free to innovate on curriculum, schedules, and the length and makeup of their school day.

Boston followed in 1995 with "pilot schools," meant to have some of the major benefits of charter schools while maintaining union representation and oversight by the city's school committee.

The Boston Foundation has just released a major study on how they are doing, full of complex findings and plenty of methodological issues to quibble about, but it offers to key messages:

1. Charter schools are clearly helping Boston kids get a much better education than conventional schools.

2. But pilot schools -- especially in the middle school years -- aren't helping very much if at all.

Study author Thomas Kane of Harvard's Graduate School of Education found a big impact for Boston kids in charter schools: "As they move from 4th grade through middle school, 6th 7th 8th grade, those differences dramatically expand'' in how well they do on standardized tests compared to Boston schoolchildren in conventional schools. "People who won the lottery to attend the charter schools have outcomes on the 8th grade MCAS [test] that are only slightly lower than the average test score of the kids from the Brookline public schools -- not the Boston public schools,'' but Brookline. (Brookline

is an affluent suburb right next door to Boston that has superb schools, just as you might expect in a town where according to the 2000 Census 77 percent of adults over age 25 have graduated from college and nearly 45 percent have advanced, graduate, or professional degrees.

But Boston's pilot schools, the report found, aren't having anything like that same impact, and may actually be doing worse at the middle school level than regular schools. Pilot schools were conceived of by Boston teachers' unions as a kind of middle ground between charter schools and regular city schools. In both, the principal and teachers control curriculum and schedule. But pilot school teachers are unionized and overseen by the city school board and superintendent. (At both schools, the special "charter" or "pilot" status can be revoked if kids' test scores lag.)

"Each year spent in a pilot school was associated with lower achievement in English, language arts and math,'' Kane said. "It's in the middle school area where the charters are having the largest positive effect.''

Boston School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson and other educational specialists had plenty of quibbles with which charter and pilot schools Kane's group chose to study in different parts of the report. (For some comparisons the report covers only schools that were popular enough to have to award student slots by lottery, excluding the less popular schools, which arguably means only the best charter schools -- those parents and kids most want to attend -- are compared to the city average. The study also reports achievements only by "standard deviation" from averages, not in a clear "X percent better or worse" format.)

"Neither all the charters or all the pilots were included in the study,'' Johnson said in remarks at a Boston Foundation event where the report was released. "We do have probably the best of the charter schools in the sample.''

But Johnson agrees that all schools can learn from the alternative schools' success and said she wants to "do the kind of 'learning walks' that we're doing in our schools into the charters and into the pilot schools so we can learn from them and create opportunity'' for all Boston schoolchildren.