Dunleavy misrepresents national charter school study

“The world is losing population,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy, world demographer for a day, claimed at a press conference last week.

“Some people are celebrating that. They think its’s probably the best thing in the world to eventually give this whole piece of ground called the world back to the birds and the bees. A lot of us don’t think that’s probably the best for civilization and humankind. But we need more people,” Dunleavy said.

Never a numbers man, Dunleavy is working from imaginary statistics. The world is not losing population. The world total topped 8 billion in 2022.

Dunleavy also drew from his bag of imaginary material to promote his political power grab from school districts over the creation of new charter schools. While not as clearly wrong as he is on world population trends, Dunleavy is misrepresenting the position of charter schools in Alaska for political purposes.

“Those are schools supposedly for elite kids in Alaska. You have to be a very wealthy person to send your kid to a charter school,” said Dunleavy. “You saw the committee meeting hearings with the folks from Harvard that did this study. They didn’t say that. They said the opposite.”

“As a matter of fact, our charter schools are actually doing better because of kids that aren’t white,” Dunleavy said. “That’s what the research says.”

That’s not what the research says. Even if it did, a competent governor would not be making the sweeping claims about charter schools that Dunleavy is based on a single small study that leaves many questions unanswered.

He also falsely claimed that the study shows Alaska has the “best performing charter schools in the world.”

Here is the study, which found Alaska’s charter school students performing at a high level, compared to charter school students Outside.

“Alaska’s high ranking for charter-school student achievement may seem surprising given its low ranking for NAEP performance by all public-school students,” Paul Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel wrote in their report.

“In a 2019 analysis by the Urban Institute, Alaska ranked at or near the bottom in both reading and math in grades 4 and 8. It is possible that results are skewed in some way by the challenge of controlling for Alaska’s distinctive indigenous population, which makes up about 20 percent of K–12 students,” they said.

The charter study was based on a small number of students in Alaska, about 500 every two years, a total of 2,430 students over a decade. The study said that because Alaska had a limited number of test scores, the results were less precisely estimated than for most states.

Alaska had too few test scores to be ranked on the scale listing the performance of black charter school students. The scores for white students in Alaska were among the highest in the nation.

Alaska also had too few test scores to be included in the ranking of states showing white-black differences on tests and the ranking of white-Hispanic differences on test scores.

As I wrote here last month, Alaska’s charter schools deserve a serious examination. This study deserves a serious examination. What we’re getting from Dunleavy is nothing but a political scheme to increase his control over local education.

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