A Comparative Analysis of Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools

Download or read book A Comparative Analysis of Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools written by Jodi Renee Abbott Smith and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this descriptive research study was to compare charter and traditional public schools on the academic knowledge of fifth grade students as measured by Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) in a suburb of a large southwestern city. This analysis also compared charter and traditional public schools on AYP status. It was hypothesized that there would be one type of school that demonstrated statistically higher achievement and more instances of meeting AYP. Data were collected over the course of the 2009, 2010 and 2011 school years. Between 2005 and 2011, charter schools grew at a higher rate than traditional public schools. The state of Arizona measures student achievement based on knowledge of the state academic standards as measured by the AIMS assessment. Twenty-seven matched pairs of charter and traditional public schools were compared on similar socioeconomic status, location and ethnicity. Student percentages were collected and analyzed using repeated measures factorial ANOVA. The analysis suggested no statistical difference in the academic achievement between charter and traditional public schools. It was also found that there was no statistical difference between the number of charter and traditional public schools who met AYP. Within a suburb of a large southwestern city, charter schools are growing in number, but do not significantly outperform their traditional public school counterparts.