| Charter Schools Can Measure Success |
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| Written by Imperial Valley News | |
| Sunday, 11 January 2009 | |
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Los Angeles, California - A principle of public charter schools is that families should be able to choose the school that best fits their child’s needs. Without any reliable informational tools about charters until recently, however, that choice was often left to mostly intuition and guesswork. Enter Priscilla Wohlstetter, director of the Center for Educational Governance at the USC Rossier School of Education, who developed stakeholder surveys in collaboration with the charter school community to measure how the schools are faring in the eyes of parents, teachers and students. “The whole idea is to empower charter schools with information about their consumers –the people they’re trying to serve,” Wohlstetter said. “They need to serve the families and teachers who have chosen their school, and prior to these surveys, there was no systematic way for judging what the community thought.” After a successful pilot program with about 80 schools in California, the surveys are now going national. A benchmarking tool to compare charter schools across the United States will finally be accessible, streamlined and user-friendly. With the new surveys, parents can seek out the best schools for their children according to their priorities. Feedback from other parents can be viewed and charters with comparable demographics or geographic locations can be measured against one another. In addition, school administrators now can judge what is working within their schools according to survey results, and teachers can reflect on what their students think about their learning experiences. The surveys give a more comprehensive view of school success, and each school can customize five questions within its survey to fit its own unique mission and goals. Elizabeth Robitaille, vice president of the School Achievement Data Team for the California Charter Schools Association, which represents about 700 schools within the state, said member schools have found the surveys to be an invaluable tool. “Some things are more difficult to measure than test scores,” Robitaille said. “A lot of them, in addition to student achievement, include social justice or environmental responsibility or safety. The surveys allow charter schools to measure these things because they are customizable and can ask questions tailored to the school.” Robitaille added that because charter schools are accountable to a school board, they have to demonstrate their results for renewal. Thus, their ability to measure and present reliable data through the surveys has been useful, she said. |
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