Gary Miron, Christopher Nelson, and John Risley
The Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University
October 2002
This report appraises charter schools in Pennsylvania five years along, seeking to gauge their impact and provide some recommendations for the future. It provides a wealth of information for people specifically interested in the Keystone State's 90 charter schools. Its value to everyone else is more limited. Regarding the educational performance of the schools, the authors note that, overall, charter pupils are "gaining ground" on traditional public school students (using PSSA scores, filtered for student background factors), though they voice concern that some schools showed great gains while others great losses. They argue that the Commonwealth's accountability arrangements for its charter schools are not yet adequate: to date, just a quarter of them have even been audited. The report also raises some interesting questions that it does not answer. For example, while teacher and parent satisfaction levels in charters are high, are they higher than in conventional public schools? In private schools? Though they find that some charter-style innovations are beginning to appear in public schools, are those public schools improving? Given the great variation in charter school performance, what characteristics do the best ones share? And what, if anything, can be done to develop charter schools in the 73% of Pennsylvania counties that still have none? To access this study, go to http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr.
