Dimishing Data--4 More Years!

Diminishing Data

Claiming expense and time constraints, the U.S. Department of Education has cut back on the information it collects on charter schools, but critics are questioning the motivation.

"Most researchers are outraged, except for those with an agenda," says Alfie Kohn, an educational reformer and author of several books including his latest, What Does It Mean to be Well Educated? "Any good researcher wants to know as much as possible about their subject."

Education department officials say, however, they are committed to providing "reliable and timely data" on charter schools, but with the number of charter schools growing, the "realities of time and budget" influenced the decision.

The recent survey, The National Assessment of Educational Progress (otherwise dubbed the nation's report card), profiled 1,010 charter schools with myriad information, including details about student-teacher ratios, the qualifications of teachers and principals, and the attendance numbers of low-income students. It also compared charter and public school student achievement, which revealed charter school students generally lagged behind their public school counterparts.

Now, however, officials say the National Center for Educational Statistics will conduct a random sample from just 300 schools. Department officials denied the change has anything to do with the recent survey, saying the change was decided before the comparison data was available.

"Decisions on the design of NCES surveys nearly always involve compromises between all the information anyone could want and the realities of time and budget," says David Thomas, a department spokesman.

Experts say the number of charter schools in the country will greatly increase in coming years because the No Child Left Behind act recommends public schools in need of improvement for more than two consecutive years choose charter schools as options to improve performance.

Given the administration's support for charter schools, critics are suspiciously eyeing the cutback in charter school data.

Kohn thinks the change is part of a trend. "When they possess data that won't come out the way they want it, they shut off the supply of data," he says.

--Margaret Tierney

http://nces.ed.gov/

NCES (National Center for Educational Statistics) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data that are related to education in the United States and other nations.