YEAR 3 REPORT:
EVOLUTION OF PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT
IN
ALBANY NY CHARTER SCHOO
CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE IN CALIFORNIA
credo.stanford.edu
June 2009
This report was created in partnership with the California Department of Education.
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INTRODUCTION
This report supplements the CREDO National Charter School Study Multiple Choice: Charter School
Performance in 16 States with an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools in California. This
state-specific analysis follows the approach used for the pooled national study. Since the methods used to
estimate the effects of charter schooling on student academic performance are detailed in the larger report,
they will not be repeated here. For the interested reader, the full report is available at credo.stanford.edu.
This document reports on the analysis of 3 years of schooling, beginning with the 2005-2006 school year
and concluding with the 2007-2008 data. A total of 228,723 charter school students from 687 charter
schools are followed for as many years as data are available. The students are drawn from Grades 2 - 11,
since these are the grades that are covered by the state achievement testing program. An identical number
of virtual comparison students are included in the analysis. The composite virtual student is based on
students in competitor traditional public schools, known as the charter school’s feeder pool. In California, it
was possible to create virtual matches for 77 percent of the charter schools students in reading and 81
percent in math. This proportion assures that the results reported here can be considered as indicative of
the overall performance of charter schools in the state. The total number of observations is large enough to
be confident that the tests of effect will be sensitive enough to detect real differences between charter school
and traditional school students at the p<.05 level.
Academic growth on state achievement tests is used as the outcome of inte