The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the 7th grade reading performance among a random sample of urban public school
academies (charter schools) in Wayne County, Michigan, compared with a random
sample of traditional urban public schools within the same geographic area.
This study was conducted using the fall 2012 Michigan Educational Assessment
Program (MEAP) reading test scores, as reported by the Michigan Department of
Education. A total of 11 public charter schools were selected and represented
15% of the total public charters in Wayne County that serviced middle school
aged children. The 11 randomly selected Traditional Public Schools used for the
comparison represented 10% of these traditional public schools that were
located within a 5-mile radius of the public charter schools. Contingency tables were constructed (type of school vs. reading
proficiency) and the data was analyzed using the nonparametric chisquare test
for independence. According to the data, the traditional public schools had a
higher percentage of grade 7 students who were proficient readers when compared
with the public charter schools (30.7% vs. 18.6%, respectively). The
difference, however, was not statistically significant and the null hypothesis
was not rejected. These results suggested that the public charter schools were
not outperforming traditional public schools in grade 7 reading proficiency.
Cite this paper
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