Waiting for Superman has energized reformers and citizens long frustrated with the pace of improvement of American schools. It’s vindicated choice proponents (like me!) who started screaming more than two dozen years ago that attention be paid to the problems that pervade urban and suburban education. Finally, there’s movie - an entertaining, non-wonky, but incredibly smart, movie - that tells it like it is. College students cry when they see the trailer, grown people cry when they see the movie, and a national campaign is on to promote its findings and its solutions.

There’s only one big problem in the entire movie. It uses flawed data to characterize charter schools, leaving viewers confused about why, if charters are only marginally good, is this being touted as a solution?

The answer of course is that most charter schools are more than marginally good. In fact, in 25 of 40 states with charter schools in the 2009-2010 school year, charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in most measures of achievement, including the gateway and foundational courses of reading and math. States where this does not happen either have lousy laws (school boards are in control - only) or lousy authorizers (the now famed Ohio example where small theatre groups with no credibility could “authorize” a charter).

There is much more to it, of course, and we’ve written tomes proving that great laws make for great schools. But the movie doesn’t tell the truth about the achievement of charter schools because it relies on the findings of one group’s one study (which is riddled with methodology and data origination flaws). We’ve rebuffed it before and will continue to do so. And, hey it’s easier to quote the New York Times quoting one study than it is to ask state by state how charters are doing. The reality is that real, objective data can only be derived from meaningful apples to apples comparisons of students in states, using state assessments (which is the predominant means of assessing student achievement anyway).

So before the movie airs publicly, we’d humbly suggest the producers take one more look at the data they are using, lest they confuse and undermine their goal of telling their audiences that there is more than one way to deliver good education and help children succeed, that branding a child by zip code is like mandating everyone eat eggs for breakfast, and that without real quality options (which do indeed exist at a rate of three times 17%) we will not change the landscape, nor the skies above it, and we’ll be waiting for Superman for more decades to come.

*(image: 2007, User:S Sepp, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

Charters are not only closing the achievement gap for those stuck in failing schools but educating diverse student populations that represent wide variation in income and race.

But what about their effect on students’ futures?

A study looked at the achievement and movement of charter students in Florida and Chicago and has found a direct (positive) impact on graduation rate and college matriculation.

Two key findings:

Students who attend a charter high school are 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who attend a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school are 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college.

The “what” is clear. Charter schools are providing the necessary environment for students to break the 70 percent graduation rate and not only earn their high school diploma but move on to college in many cases.

The “why” may take a little more time to nail down, but whatever it is, it’s working.

I have good friends in the abstinence movement who make a compelling, statistically sound case for using abstinence over birth control to ensure girls don’t get pregnant. The proponents of “safe sex” have powerful data too. That doesn’t make them right. In fact, objective analysts would say it depends.

I also have friends who believe that drugs, if legalized, would reduce teen dependence. The other side argues well against such “market” arguments. But the drug usage data, like studies of sexual data, do not seem to dictate the practice one way or another.

Now along comes a study about charter schools which the Center for Education Reform finds wholly inadequate and, in fact, flawed on fundamental levels. And such a critique is considered by its authors, promoters, and academic sponsors as somewhat unjust or “partisan”? Huh?

Get over it, folks. Decrying nearly half of all charters as near failures without having studied their actual children, their scores, their prior records or the comparable condition of the school to which they were assigned is, like sex and drugs, emotional and sensory, not fact based.

Great educations aside, this is yet another example of academics being confined to ivory tower thinking and not getting enough reality to inform their methodology.

Or, to use the present analogy, it’s like having sex with instructions from a book and wondering why it didn’t work.

Study it, yes, but for God’s sake, CREDO, get out of yourself and make some clear, grounded time and place conclusions.

Or try abstinence.