In a New York Times Magazine article, Steven Brill compared a public school and a charter school in the “same building” in New York City with classrooms that “have almost exactly the same number of students” to purportedly illustrate the benefits of charter schools over public schools, which he suggests are burdened with the costs associated with teachers unions.

However, he left out some key details that undermine his comparison. In fact, a Washington Post education writer called Brill's comparison “bogus.”

Brill compares Harlem Success Academy and P.S. 149, which he writes share the "[s]ame building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents." Brill then states: “And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class.”

Using those details as a basis of equivalency between the two schools, Brill then draws a lengthy contrast between them:

On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work -- and typically performing at or above grade level. Their progress in a variety of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.m., ends at 4:30 to 5:30 and begins in August. The teachers have three periods for lesson preparation, and they must be available by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a car service home if they stay late into the evening to work with students. There are special instruction sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in “Yale 2026” for one kindergarten class I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $18,378 per student per year. This includes actual cash outlays for everything from salaries to the car service, plus what the city says (and the charter disputes) are the value of services that the city contributes to the charter for utilities, building maintenance and even “debt service” for its share of the building.

On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching pension contributions paid to the charter teachers that cost the school $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a pension plan that is now costing the city $2,605 per year per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, but $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would cost $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would still be voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city's records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.

Brill uses this comparison to state that “while the public side spends more, it produces less.” However, Brill doesn't mention the relevant differences between the student demographics of the two schools.

Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss -- who doesn't dispute HSA's success -- pointed out Brill's apples-to-oranges comparison, calling it “bogus”:

What I will do, though, is point out the very real differences between two school populations that Brill says are the same.

This is important, because, as we all know, it isn't fair to compare apples and oranges and pretend the comparison is between two pieces of the same fruit.

In his story, Brill writes about a building on 118th Street in Harlem that houses a charter school, the Harlem Success Academy on one side, and a regular public school, P.S. 149, on the other. He says the charter school spends less per person, but achieves better results:

[...]

At P.S. 149, 20 percent of the kids are special education students; and 40% of these are the most severely disabled, in self-contained classes ... and 13% are English Language Learners. In 2008 (the latest available data) more than 10% were homeless.

[...]

At the Harlem Success Academy, 2% of the students are English Language Learners (compared to 13% at P.S. 149 --more than six times as many). The school says it has16.9% special education students, (compared to 20% at P.S. 149) and of these, few if any are the most severely disabled. The charter school had three homeless students in the 2008-09 school year, less than 1 percent of its population (compared to P.S.149's 10 percent).

[...]

Charter school advocates don't have to make bogus comparisons to boost their argument in favor of an expansion of these institutions.

Strauss concluded by providing some additional context to the public school-charter school comparison:

Traditional public schools have to educate every student who is eligible to enroll. They can't counsel students out, as many charters do, or select who they want. This is not an excuse for bad schools. But it is part of the reason that the job of the traditional public school system, which still educates about 95 percent of all schoolkids, is far more complicated than many reformers today would have you believe.