State Testing and Charters

Hey everyone,

Testing season is here, yay!  The district and the state give charters the autonomy to teach their own curriculum. Therefore, charters do not have to teach to any of the state standards. Because this is true, how can we expect to have results that monitor our student growth across the board accurately? Generally speaking, charter schools do not score well on the milestones tests but why should we expect them to if we do not hold them to the same standard? The data from my charter shows that we score roughly the same as other APS schools on GA milestones. However, when we compare our results on the ITBS we score much higher than the surrounding APS schools. I hope we can devise a system where can compare apples to apples someday. Right now, we are testing unequal systems with different motivations and foci.

Davy