State Assessments: Does a Charter School Truly Demonstrate Higher Proficiency than its Public Counterpart?

Authors

  • Corinne M. Kindzierski Canisius College
  • Ali Ait Si Mhammed Canisius College
  • Nancy Wallace Canisius College
  • Christine Lesh Tapestry Charter School

Keywords:

charter schools, mandated assessments, proficiency scores

Abstract

This project compared annual mandated assessment results for an urban charter school, two comparable urban schools and the encompassing urban district. Scores in grades three through eight in the target school were analyzed to determine the percentage of students scoring at proficiency levels three and four (scores of one and two are considered failing). These scores were then compared to the surrounding district as well as two other schools with similar demographics using a Z-test for estimation of a proportion. The results indicated although the number of students who performed at proficiency in the target school seemed to be higher, once corrected for the disparity in population size, these students perform the same, or worse than, students in comparable schools. Further, the scores are more inconsistent between grades in the target school than the scores in the lower performing schools. Suggestions for remediating the inconsistency and addressing the problems for consistently low percentage of proficiency scores are provided.

Author Biographies

Corinne M. Kindzierski, Canisius College

Corinne M. Kindzierski is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Canisius College. Her research interests include assessing student performance of students with special needs in charter schools, the quality of teachers serving students with significant special needs and measuring the impact of pre-service teachers on student achievement.

Ali Ait Si Mhammed, Canisius College

Ali Ait Si Mhammed is an Assistant Professor of Adolescent Education at Canisius College. His research interests include school-wide assessment and policy impact, working with diverse students and statistics.

Nancy Wallace, Canisius College

Nancy Wallace is an Associate Professor of early Childhood Education at Canisius College. Her research interests include professional development schools, the inclusion of the arts in education and pre-service teacher preparation.

Christine Lesh, Tapestry Charter School

Christina Lesh is the school principal of Tapestry Charter elementary school. Her research interests include professional development schools, high-stakes accountability and expeditionary learning.

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Published

2013-08-12

How to Cite

Kindzierski, C. M., Ait Si Mhammed, A., Wallace, N., & Lesh, C. (2013). State Assessments: Does a Charter School Truly Demonstrate Higher Proficiency than its Public Counterpart?. Current Issues in Education, 16(2). Retrieved from https://cie.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/cieatasu/article/view/1072

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2013)

Section

Spring/Fall Issue

License

Authors retain copyright without restrictions. Unless otherwise indicated, from 2021 all articles are published under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. For more information visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Articles published prior to 2021 used a CC-BY-NC-SA license.