Charter School parents:  brace yourselves.  The teachers unions and their minions in academia and the non-profit world are getting ready for another onslaught against your kids’ lifeboats.

MPR runs R a report saying charter schools are “charter schools more segregated, underperforming” compared to the factory schools:

The Twin Cities area’s 30,000 charter school students score 7.5 percentage points lower on math testing and 4.4 percent lower on reading tests than students at traditional public schools, according to the report from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty.

“If you look at the total group, they’re underperforming the public schools significantly and a lot of the ones who are serving the poorest kids are not only doing very badly, but not lasting very long,” said Myron Orfield, the institute’s director.

For starters – the presence of Myron Orfield means the report is a political, not legal or academic, effort.

But I’ll ask them the same questions I do every single time these sorts of “studies” come up:  did the “study” control for the fact that so many students, especially in high school come to charter schools after failing, and being utterly failed, at the traditional factory schools?

Did it compare their performance at their traditional and charter schools?

Diid the “study” attempt to show aggregate change of individual students over time as they transitioned from public to charter schools?

Eugene Piccolo of the MInnesota Association of Charter Schools agrees:

Pioccolo would like to see more emphasis on studying the progress individual students make as they navigate their way through a charter school education.

Here’s the other bit where these “studies” confuse cause and effect:

The U of M’s report also shows charter schools are becoming more segregated.

“There’s a continual rapid growth of charter schools and the single-race white charter schools are growing fast but they’re all continuing to grow very fast,” Orfield said.

That’s just inflammatory stupidity.

There is no such thing as a “single-race white charter school”.  Oh, a charter school in Glenwood will likely be mostly white, but the real growth is in the mostly-minority charter schools in the inner city; the vast majority of charter schools students in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are black, Asian, Latino or Native American.

And since people have to make an effort to go to a charter school – they aren’t assigned by the school district – it’s not a matter of anyone’s official discrimination; it’s because the parents are disgusted with the fourth rate education they get from Myron Orfiield’s buddies in the educational-industrial complex.

These “studies” are worthless for purposes of assessing education – they don’t pretend to do anything more than tie average test scores to buildings.

What they are is the opening shots in the DFL/media/union (pardon the redundancy) effort to try to roll back school choice.

So if you’re a black, asian, latino or native parent in the Twin Cities – why the hell do you keep voting DFL?   All they want to do is stuff your kids back into their public schools and shut them, and you, up.

They and their minions are a gun pointed at your kids’ futures.