麻豆传媒映画

A version of this column originally appeared on the Goldwater Institute blog.

If you鈥檝e been reading The Arizona 搁别辫耻产濒颈肠鈥檚 multi-part charter school series recently, you鈥檝e witnessed a fantastic magic trick: Like a magician cutting his assistant in two, The Republic has slashed charter schools鈥� performance data literally in half. Unfortunately, while a magician鈥檚 audience knows it鈥檚 being deceived, The 搁别辫耻产濒颈肠鈥檚 does not.

By , The Republic found that about 60 percent of K-8 charter schools, and slightly over half of high schools, outperformed their district peers. However, The Republic decided to package these findings with a comparison of a third type of school: charter and district schools that serve both K-8 and high school students, called 鈥渉ybrid鈥� schools.

Amazingly, when including this third group, charters鈥� academic performance suddenly cratered: Less than 25 percent of hybrid charters outperformed their district peers.

With the charter average weighed down by these failed hybrid schools, The Republic conceded only that charters beat district schools 鈥渁bout half the time鈥� and unveiled this marquee graphic featuring hybrid charters鈥� anemic performance:

Yet The 搁别辫耻产濒颈肠鈥檚 writers seemingly never bothered to wonder why charter schools, which they found to be outperforming districts in grades K-8 and 9-12, suddenly implode when they have students from both, while district schools do just fine under this arrangement. 聽(Or perhaps worse, the writers did look into this and still plowed forward with their reporting anyway).

So how was the magic done?

Well, of the 403 charter schools with 2018 letter grade from the State Board of Education, 70 are classified as 鈥渉ybrids.鈥� Glancing at the data, you can see that hybrid charters actually earned more points on the A-F letter grade rubric for both their K-8 and high school students than standalone K-8 and high school charters did, and that hybrids include 2 of Arizona鈥檚 strongest charter school networks: BASIS and Great Hearts.

So if the problem isn鈥檛 with hybrid charters鈥� performance, how do their neighborhood district peers so thoroughly demolish them?

It turns out that only a handful of district schools are classified as hybrids across the entire state (out of more than a thousand), including only four in all of Maricopa County, and only one in Pima County. The most centrally located of those schools in Maricopa and the single hybrid district school in Pima both happen to be extremely highly rated schools. 聽

So, the grand reveal: Since The Republic thought it fitting to segregate hybrid schools from all others, the paper essentially pitted the performance of over 60 charter schools in Maricopa and Pima Counties not against their actual nearest district peers (whose performance they generally exceed) as The Republic claimed, but against 2 A-rated 鈥渉ybrid鈥� district schools that lay potentially dozens of miles further away. 聽

Imagine the outrage if charter advocates tried a similar stunt鈥攆or example, putting together a graph showing charter schools beating district schools鈥� performance over 90 percent of the time鈥�and burying somewhere deep in the footnotes the fact that every district school was being compared not to their neighborhood charter, but to BASIS Scottsdale, which U.S. News & World Report as the best public high school in the country.

Like its to downplay the fact charters receive less money than district schools, The Republic has muddied the waters and misinformed its readers about the contributions of Arizona鈥檚 charter schools.

As I and others have elsewhere, Arizona鈥檚 charters have been shown to outperform district schools while costing taxpayers less money. This is something to celebrate, not to subject to theatrics and deception.

is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.