Charter leaders defend scores

According to a recent state assessment, traditional high school students outperform their charter high school counterparts by leaps and bounds. But charter leaders say the comparison is unfair and not indicative of charters' progress.

The State Office of Education has reported that more traditional high school students than charter students passed the Utah Basic Skills Competency Test (UBSCT), the state's graduation test in reading writing and math.

In reading, writing and math, charter schools lagged behind traditional schools by more than 10 percentage points in students' proficiency. However, charter leaders say comparing the two is comparing apples and oranges.

Out of Utah's 28 charter schools only 13 serve high school students. And of those schools, well over half of them target at-risk students.

Uintah River High is a charter school on an Indian reservation where in the past students rarely graduated from high school.

Success School in Granite District targets truants who are on probation, have behavior problems and are behind in school. Same with Dream, a school that works closely with youths in the court system and caters to underserved and disadvantaged students.

"If your entire student body is made up of students that would be considered at-risk students — that is, students who have failed in many if not most of the classes in traditional school settings — it's only reasonable to expect that those students would not score as high," said Eric Lindsay, director of Fast Forward charter in Logan and East Hollywood in Granite. "We go after the ones on the street and who are falling through the cracks."

Also Lindsay said many of the charter high schools are new this year, as are the students coming in. And it's hard to accurately show what is being taught in charters when students have only been in school half the year.

He said too often he hears that charter school students are not performing academically as well on tests as traditional public students, but they don't tell the rest of the story.

"If you stop there it does paint an unfair picture of charter schools," said Lindsay. "What you have to do is go beyond that and look at the academic improvement they make once in a charter school environment."

Judy Park, state testing director, agrees and said the study was actually conducted only to show how charters are doing, not how they are doing compared with traditional schools.

"You just have to realize all those variables that go with it," said Park.

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