NORTH COUNTY -- Fewer students at local charter schools performed at grade level on standardized tests when measured against comparable traditional schools, according to data contained in a federal review of all California schools released last week.
Despite generally lower marks on the federal evaluation, many North County charter schools received high scores on a separate state evaluation that measures improvement in a school's academic performance.
While all but one of the region's nine charter schools passed the federal review, they consistently had lower percentages of students scoring at passing levels in English and math -- according to the study.
Charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate independently of the districts where they are located, have drawn heat from opponents such as the American Federation of Teachers, which recently issued a report saying they fail to educate kids as well as traditional public schools.
Charter school proponents, meanwhile, contend that they offer parents an alternative to large, traditional public schools and consistently increase the performance of the lowest-achieving students in an area.
The recent review is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and requires schools to meet minimum passing rates of between 9.6 and 16 percent in the two subjects.
State officials say the two evaluations measure student performance on different tests and are weighted differently. For example, the state's Academic Performance Index gives schools more points for raising the scores of students at the lowest end of the performance spectrum. On the other hand, state officials said the federal evaluation simply looks at how many students at a school are performing at grade level.
The differences
Charter school administrators contend that what they view as the unique academic programs at their schools account for the mixed performances on their federal reviews.
At Escondido Charter High School, 77 percent of students performed at grade level in English, while 56 percent met the federal standards in math, according to the data.
Those scores fell short of the performance at schools such as Torrey Pines High School in Del Mar and San Dieguito High Academy in Encinitas, which the California Department of Education considers to be schools with demographics similar to Escondido Charter.
All of those schools are predominantly white with few students coming from low income or non-English speaking households.
More than 80 percent of students at both of those schools performed at grade level in both areas, according to the data. Escondido Charter's students did outperform students at Rancho Bernardo High School in Poway, another similar school.
Escondido Charter's director, Dennis Snyder, said the recent scores reflect the school administration's decision to have the 240 students in the school's traditional classroom program counted in the same group as the 650 students in independent learning programs.
He said students who have had academic problems at other public schools often transfer in to Escondido's independent study program only months before the state issues its standardized tests, on which the federal review is based.
The school also tests all students at the beginning and end of each course before moving them to the next level.
"What we track for our internal evaluations is, if that kid was with us for a year, did he improve?," Snyder said.
Things look the same all around
Other charter schools also scored behind comparable traditional schools on the federal review and charter administrators echoed Snyder's explanation of the difficulties in comparing charter students and programs to other public schools.
The "adequate yearly progress" report showed Guajome Park Academy in Vista had 48 percent of its students perform at grade level in English and 29 percent in math, scores 10 to 25 percent lower than comparable schools in Fallbrook and Escondido.
At Escondido's Classical Academy, an elementary school that mixes classroom learning with home-schooling, 63 percent of students met the minimum English standards and 49 percent passed the math standards. Meanwhile, the elementary schools with similar student demographics in Del Mar, Solana Beach and Carlsbad had passing rates on the federal review that were 20 percent higher in math.
Cameron Curry, Classical Academy's business director, said the school provides families with material appropriate for their child's academic ability, and doesn't focus on simply teaching to tests.
"We're focusing on trying to meet the child's need," Curry said.
"Testing is only a small part of whether a charter school is successful or not," he said.
In Bonsall, less than half of the 55 students tested at Bonsall Charter Academy for Learning scored at grade level in English and less than 15 percent met the federal target in math.
Jef Schleiger, Bonsall Union Elementary School District's superintendent and administrator of the charter school, said those numbers reflect a variety of factors. The number of students tested at the charter school was small, he said, when compared to larger public schools, and many of the students transferred to the academy from other schools in the middle of the school year.
Moreover, he said, the school's sixth- through 12th-grade structure made comparing Bonsall's performance with traditional middle or high schools difficult.
The complexities of comparing students
In fact, based on the number of students who qualify for free lunches -- a standard means of measuring poverty rates in schools -- Bonsall Charter's student body would be similar to that of traditionally high-performing schools, such as San Dieguito Academy, according to the Education Data Partnership, a Web page sponsored by the state's department of education and other education analysts.
But Schleiger said that on deeper examination of the schools' demographics, the level of parent education and other factors simply didn't compare.
"Socio-economically, we're looking at a completely different picture than San Dieguito," Schleiger said.
Mary Perry, the deputy director of EdSource, a nonprofit organization that analyzes education policy, said that comparing charter schools to other state schools is a complex, and on some levels, unachievable task.
"We're talking about two different universes," Perry said. "We're talking about schools that are fundamentally different."
And while schools with similar student bodies often have similar test scores, the correlation is not inevitable, she said.
"There are schools that teach students that come from more challenging backgrounds and have a lot better test scores than other kids who, on paper, have a similar background," she said.
That kind of improvement can account for many of the high scores on the state's Academic Performance Index, according to Gary Larson of the California Charter Schools Association.
"The thing you have to look at is how are individual students doing and how would they do or did they do in a traditional program," Larson said, adding that the state's evaluation shows that.
Contact staff writer David Fried at (760) 631-6621 or dfried@nctimes.com.
