Mercy! Mercy! From Wikipedia:

A mercy rule, also well known by the slightly less polite term slaughter rule (or, less commonly, knockout rule and skunk rule), brings a sports event to an early end when one team has a very large and presumably insurmountable lead over the other team. It is called the mercy rule because it spares the losing team the humiliation of suffering a more formal loss, and denies the winning team the satisfaction thereof, and prevents running up the score, a generally discouraged practice in which the opponent continues to score beyond the point when the game has become out of hand. The mercy rule is most common in North America and primarily in North American sports such as baseball or softball, where there is no game clock and play could theoretically continue forever, although it is also used in sports such as hockey and American football. It is very rare in competitive sports beyond the high school level.

What kind of lead do you have to have call on the mercy rule?

In Little League Baseball and Softball, rules call for the game to end if the winning team is ahead by 10 runs after four innings (3½ innings if the home team is ahead).

In NCAA and NAIA college baseball, the game will end if a team is ahead by at least 10 runs after seven innings in a scheduled 9-inning game. Most NCAA conferences only apply the rule on the final day of a series for travel reasons or during conference tournaments in order to allow the next game to start. The rule is not allowed for the NCAA Division I tournament, where all games must be nine innings.

In NCAA softball, the rule is invoked if one team is ahead by at least eight runs after five innings and, unlike with college baseball, applies in the NCAA tournament as well. In American high school softball, most states use a mercy rule of 10 in five innings. (In either case, if the home team is ahead by the requisite number of runs, the game will end after the top half of the inning.)

Most state high school associations (where games are seven innings) have rules where a baseball game ends after the winning team has built a 10-run lead and at least five innings have been played.

Ever wonder how charters stack up to traditional public schools statewide on the STAAR, Texas’ state mandated assessment? Might we need a mercy rule? I will first conduct a descriptive comparison of the 2013 STAAR scale score means for reading and math for ALL Texas schools reporting results in various demographic categories. I compare the means for all schools statewide (charters versus non-charters). Here is what I found. (I do also have the STAAR scale scores for 3-8 and EOC. I will calculate and post that data at a future date)

Descriptive Comparison of Means: 2013 STAAR Average Scale Scores

Traditional public schools outscored charters across demographic groups 13-1 in 2013. Mercy!! The lone bright spot for charters was for African Americans on the STAAR reading (More on that later).

The next question is: Are the differences in mean scale scores statistically significant? I conducted t-tests.

T-Test Comparison of Means: 2013 STAAR Average Scale Scores

On the 3^rd grade STAAR, the mean differences (non-charters means are larger than charter means) are significant for 12 of the 14 groups examined. The formerly single bright spot for charters, African American scores on the Reading STAAR, turned out to not be statistically significant.

Again. Mercy rule applies.

Disclosure: As I have mentioned previously, I was an instructor at Aspire’s East Palo Alto charter and I currently sit on the board of the UT-Austin charter school. This insider view on charters has inspired research that shows that not all is well in the direction of the choice movement.

Are there excellent charters? Of course. For example, The University of Texas Elementary School Charter outperforms the average scales scores for the state for charters (11 of 11) and non-charters (8 of 11).

University of Texas Charter School 2013 STAAR Scale Scores

But on average, across the entire state of Texas, charters did not outperform our traditional public schools on the 3rd grade STAAR in 2013. As previously discussed, in future posts I will take a look at 8th grade STAAR results and the EOC Algebra I and English I Reading.

It’s a Skunk! 🙂 (Well, almost)

For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.

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