Bad News for Charter Schools

The New York Times reports today that not everyone who graduates from high school in New York is ready for college. That’s no surprise. But the news for charter schools was pretty grim:

Statewide, 77 percent of students graduate from high school….A state committee determined last year that a 75 on the English Regents and a 80 on the math Regents roughly predicted that students would get at least a C in a college-level course in the same subject. Scores below that meant students had to often take remediation classes before they could do college-level work. Only 41 percent of New York State graduates in 2009 achieved those scores.

….The data also cast new doubt on the ability of charter schools to outperform their traditional school peers. Statewide, only 10 percent of students at charters graduated in 2009 at college-ready standards, though 49 percent received diplomas.

Statewide in New York, about 50% of high school graduates are college ready. In charter schools, about 20% of graduates are college ready. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, since we don’t know whether the charter schools had the same quality of incoming students as the public schools. Most likely they didn’t, as the lower graduation rate shows. Still, that’s a helluva gap. It’s not good news for the charter school movement.