Joe Ferrare publishes review of national charter school study

Joe Ferrare, associate professor in IAS, was invited by the National Education Policy Center to publish a review of a major new charter school study conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. The latter study made national headlines over the summer for its findings that students in charter schools across 31 states out-performed those attending comparable traditional public schools in reading and math. However, Ferrare notes in his review that the study used a misleading metric to report its findings and that the magnitude of difference between students in the charter and traditional public sectors fails to meet the minimum threshold that experts consider to be a meaningful policy intervention.