Wisconsin School Report Cards - A Study Examining School Achievement and Poverty in Public and Charter Schools
from the Executive Summary:
This report documents findings from our analysis of the school performance data released through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Report Cards. For the purposes of this study, a charter school is defined by DPI in the Report Card data, indicated as “Y” in the “Charter School indicator” column of the DPI data spreadsheet. These charter schools include instrumentality and non-instrumentality entities. Public schools represent 95% (1,772 schools) of the total data set, charter schools 5% (101) of the total. The data show:
Higher DPI Report Card scores have a significant correlation with lower economically disadvantaged (ED) enrollment.
Almost half of the variation from school to school in DPI Report Card scores can be explained by the variation from school to school in level of ED enrollment.
On average, public schools have outperformed charter schools on DPI Report Card scores.
Even when adjusting for poverty (e.g. ED enrollment) in the analysis, public schools performed better on the DPI Report Cards than charter schools.
The aforementioned finding becomes most prominent in schools serving the poorest students.
