Official disputes WMU report saying students' gains were exaggerated February 22, 2001
BY CECIL ANGEL FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
A for-profit school management company has been no more successful at boosting student achievement than the districts that hired it, according to a Western Michigan University study released Wednesday.
But an official at Edison Schools Inc., formerly known as the Edison Project, said the study is flawed.
Edison Schools was the focus of the study funded by the National Education Association, an advocacy group for public schoolteachers. The study examined Edison's 10 oldest schools nationwide and included schools in Lansing and Mt. Clemens.
About half the schools studied were traditional public schools and the remainder were charters. The researchers concluded that Edison students show improvement from year to year in tests that measure gains in student knowledge over time.
However, "It is clear from our findings that across all schools we studied, Edison students did not perform as well as Edison claims," said Gary Miron, a researcher at WMU's Evaluation Center.
John Chubb, chief education officer for Edison Schools, said "It's a biased report that was set up from the start to criticize Edison Schools."
The data used were either old or incomplete and the study unscientific, Chubb said. "Social scientists should have been ashamed to release it," he said.
Only one of the Michigan schools -- the Mt. Clemens Secondary Academies -- cited in the study was rated above average.
Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, also in the Mt. Clemens Community Schools district, was rated below average. Mid-Michigan Academy in Lansing received the lowest rating.
"Last year, the King academy posted some of the most outstanding gains in scores in the state," Chubb said.
Edison, the nation's largest private educational management firm, has 113 schools. It cooperated with the National Education Association in setting up the study and made data from all the schools available, Chubb said.