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Time to Stop Beating Up on Charter Schools [Mackinac Center] Recently, Michigan’s 186 charter schools have come under unfair attack.

During the recent campaign, the Democratic candidate for governor took a swipe at Michigan’s charter schools, telling the Lansing State Journal that they “lack accountability.” Far from lacking accountability, charters actually meet one critical measure of accountability that no other public schools can boast: the ability of their customers to say “no, thanks” and take a walk. No Michigan parent is required to send their child to a charter school. If, for any reason, charter parents are unhappy, they can always return to a traditional public school at any time. Charter schools have exactly the kind of bottom-up accountability needed to improve public education in Michigan.

New Study of Boston Charter and Pilot Schools Finds Charter Schools Have Positive Effects on Student Achievement - News Features & Releases. By admin Researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and MIT have released the results of a groundbreaking study that suggests charter school students in Boston outperform their peers at other public schools in Boston.

Results for pilot schools were less clear; some analyses showed positive results at the elementary and high school level, while results for middle school students were less encouraging. The study uses an innovative research design based on school lotteries that allowed for a direct comparison of charter and pilot school students with their peers. The research team, led by Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Project for Policy Innovation in Education and Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Joshua Angrist, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, used data provided by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Read the technical report at. Www.gse.harvard.edu/~pfpie/pdf/InformingTheDebate_Final.pdf.