From the article: "So my correspondent–who requires anonymity– decided that it would be helpful to reporters and members of the public to explain how to read stories about charter schools." So we don't know who is advancing these comments. It is plainly not Diane Ravitch herself, and we have no idea who the person is, so we have no idea if the person suggesting this checklist is a person with a conflict of interest in education policy.

I'll go down the checklist item by item.

"Does the story compare the demographics of the student population served by charter schools to the demographics of local public schools?"

What aspect of "demographics" is most relevant here? There are already charter school programs (not many, but a few) that do better with mostly pupils who come from poor homes and parents without higher education than many other schools do with pupils who come from high-income homes.[1] A lot of public schools in the United States serve up mediocre results while serving well off pupils.

"Does it include data on the charter school attrition rate?"

This is a fair item to put on the checklist, and should be reported more in stories about schools in general. In other words, a story about public schools should also report on their attrition rate, and on what rate at which pupils move in and out of the school district, and in general how stable or unstable enrollments are at all schools being compared. (The United States has a highly geographically mobile population, and it would be a very unusual school that has the same group of pupils enrolled by sixth grade as was enrolled in first grade five years earlier.)

"Does it include data on how the students who leave the charters compare to students who leave public schools?"

Again, this is a question well worth asking, but we shouldn't guess, until we have seen the answer to questions like this, whether charter schools or public schools would come out better in a comparison of this kind. We should be checking the facts in each individual case all around the country.

"Does it include numbers of students expelled?"

Since the early 1990s, I have been aware of homeschooling advocates who talk about "push outs" (not "drop outs") from the public school system, kids who are basically told to like it or lump it in the public school system. People leaving the public school system should always be looked at closely by researchers to figure out why they left, and whether they are later able to find a more fitting school situation in which they can learn better.

"Does it include numbers of students suspended?"

As above, this is a question to ask about any kind of school. Moreover, at the extremes, a school that never suspends any pupil is possibly a school that is not trying hard enough to maintain a learning environment for all other pupils enrolled, so a researcher would want to look at grounds for suspension, procedures surrounding suspension, what corrective steps are taken when a pupil is suspended, and so on. I've certainly seen suspension abused in public school settings.

"Does the story focus exclusively on test scores?"

This is a general defect of reporting on schools. At the broad statistical level, and especially for international comparisons of school systems, test scores[2] are mostly what we have to look at. What I also look at, as someone who has lived in more than one country and who reads more than one language, is the actual item content of textbooks and the attitudes toward learning shown by teachers and pupils. I think some school systems in other countries compare very favorably to those in the United States (not least because pupils in those other countries begin foreign language study much earlier than pupils in the United States, a fact not usually reflected in international testing programs). Educational researchers should be looking more closely at the actual item content of school textbooks and at the specific teacher practices in each classroom.[3]

"If so, has someone, with educational expertise, visited the school to determine if the school focuses on test prep at the expense of a rich curriculum?"

As above, we should be looking in detail at what actually goes on in the classroom. Indeed, we should be looking at whether persons employed as teachers are actually teaching anything, which we shouldn't assume sight unseen.[4]

"Are the test scores reported outside of school assessments such as the SAT/ACT or does the story only report test scores of exams that are proctored in-house?"

This is also important, and also a question that should be applied to news stories about schools in general, not just about charter schools. So far many of the worst cheating scandals in school testing programs have originated in regular public schools.[5]

"Does the story account for the fact that, due to the need to apply to the charter school, parents of the students at charters are, on average, likely to be more engaged in education than the parents of students at public schools?"

The policy response to this is to make school choices much more widely available to many more families. I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[6]

Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[7] The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[8] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[9]

And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[10] We haven't had big problems with charter school performance here.

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.

"Does it exclusively or primarily cite reports funded by pro-charter or conservative think tanks?"

Here it's regrettable that we don't know the identity of the author of this checklist. Do we know whether or not the author is funded by pro-public-school interest groups? Disclosure of that would be helpful here.

"Does it include quotes from academic scholars or does it just cite charter school advocates?"

I can recommend a website full of the writings of actual academic scholar to Hacker News participants interested in education reform. That is the Education Next website,[11] which is better supplied than most English-language websites about education policy with information about education policy outside the United States, which is important for a reality-check on issues discussed in this country.

"Does it identify advocates or simply call them 'experts' or 'researchers'?"

This is a funny question for a commentator who insisted on anonymity to ask.

"Does it compare the resources available to charter schools to those available to public schools?"

In Minnesota, and in all states I have checked, the resources available to charter schools (funding per student, and availability of buildings) are strictly less than the resources available to public school disticts, by law. Yes, lets's check that detail carefully.

It's commendable to receive a suggestion that we should check news stories carefully. We should always do that here on Hacker News. Let's check stories on education policy especially carefully, as public school spending is a huge part of state budgets[12] and a lot of interest groups are lined up behind the public trough.

[1] http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/

[2] http://www.oecd.org/pisa/

http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

http://www.timssvideo.com/timss-video-study

[4] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/students-take-a-stand-to-topp...

[5] http://www.ajc.com/s/news/school-test-scores/#top-stories

http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-school-tests-measures-to-...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/wrong-answer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/...

[6] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...

[7] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

[8] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

[9] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

[10] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

[11] http://educationnext.org/

[12] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/12f33pub.pdf