Why do charter schools perform better

The evidence—both anecdotal and quantitative—has consistently shown that public charter schools use the flexibilities in their school models to best serve students, especially those who are historically underserved by public schools. Now we have even more. The results are significant and demonstrate how charter schools have improved as a sector and made a significant positive impact on students.

At the National Alliance we follow studies of student achievement at charter schools closely: this is the first nationally significant study since But not only is it a key update, it looks at charter school performance in new ways, utilizing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that have only recently become available to researchers.

Here are some of the most significant findings:. This is important because the authors look at the pace of improvement—student performance growth over time. Up until now studies have typically compared the average performance of students. With that lens, the findings show the pace of improvement in charter schools is faster over the year span.

The sample examined by the researchers include more than 4 million test performances. On average, district schools outperformed charter schools in in both the 4th and 8th grades—particularly in math. If charter schools harm traditional public schools by, for example, reducing funding or creating funding uncertainty—and there is some evidence for this, too—these comparisons might understate the costs of charter schools.

Regardless, test score comparisons paint an incomplete picture of charter school performance. We care about a much broader set of outcomes, including how charter schools affect racial segregation, to what extent they create options for disadvantaged families, and whether they are truly producing innovative school models. The related research is too expansive for this overview but summarized nicely in a NBER report.

When presidential candidates talk about charter schools, it is more about politics and principle than policy, since education is largely left to the states. However, the federal government plays a role. For example, the U. Department of Education administers the Charter Schools Program CSP , which provides funds to assist with matters such as charter school start-up, facilities acquisition, and replication.

Federal policymakers could increase or decrease overall funding and add or remove stipulations for that funding e. State and local policymakers regularly make consequential decisions about charter schools. These decisions cover a wide range of issues, including funding formulas, caps on the number of schools or seats allowed, determinations of which schools or types of schools to open, rules about which students get priority access to high-demand schools, and requirements for open meetings and records.

The news has offered a glimpse of the potential consequences for American students when changes in […]. Charter schools can provide options to families who otherwise might not have them. This is, in essence, the equity-based argument for charters. Wealthier families have long enjoyed school choice by paying to live in neighborhoods with good public schools or enrolling in private schools. Poorer families have depended on public school systems to provide high-quality […].

Integrating U. Board of Education in the s, the fierce resistance to school busing programs in the s, and the often-futile efforts to redraw school boundaries. Questions about which children attend which schools profoundly affect the interests […]. Voter Vitals Non-partisan, fact-based explainers on important issues for American voters.

Multimedia Videos and podcasts on key election issues. About Policy For Media. Stay Informed Sign up to get Policy updates in your inbox:. Facebook Twitter Instagram. Voter Vitals. The Vitals. Not the data. If anything, the evidence on the benefits of charter schools for low-income students has only grown stronger. The charges leveled against charters fall into two buckets.

This makes charter schools a win-win for students, as well as for taxpayers. According to a recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics, charter school students perform, on average, no better or worse than their traditional public school counterparts.

To meaningfully evaluate charter schools, as compared with their traditional public peers, comparisons must be made between comparable students in each context.

Its study, spanning 27 states, found negative effects for white students, null effects for black middle-class students, and positive effects for black and Hispanic students in poverty. White students lost 14 days of reading and 50 days of math losses due, in part, to enrollment in low-performing online charter schools. Black students in poverty gained 36 days of math and 29 days of reading learning from attending charter schools; Hispanic English-language learners gained 43 additional days of reading and 50 days of math learning.

A CREDO study analyzing 41 major urban areas found a similar pattern, with even larger effects for black and Hispanic students. Some academics have overcome this empirical difficulty by comparing students who won and lost admissions to charter schools through a random lottery.

These studies provide researchers with greater confidence that the results they are seeing are causal, but because they can be conducted only on charters that are oversubscribed, they can view only a smaller, possibly less representative, slice of the charter sector.

In , researchers from Columbia, MIT, and the University of Toronto reviewed the 15 such studies that had been conducted to date. In no case did the researchers identify a negative effect. The authors noted that the largest positive effects were found for students in low-performing urban areas. There is, of course, more to life and to school than test scores. The literature on longer-term outcomes of charter schools is smaller and somewhat more mixed, but it is still broadly positive.

On the negative-to-neutral side of the ledger, one matching study of charter schools in Texas found that they led to a small increase in college enrollment but a small decrease in adult income. On the positive side of the ledger, matching studies of charter high schools in three states found substantial benefits to college enrollment and persistence. In Chicago, attending a charter school was associated with an Several studies suggest that attending a charter school yields additional long-term benefits for students and for society.

A lottery study of a high-performing charter school network in New York City found that admission caused a 10 percentage point decrease in teen pregnancy and a 4. After all, the goal of schools is not to spend but to educate. In school districts with expanding enrollments, charter schools may provide a substantial financial benefit if charters enable districts to alleviate overcrowding without building new schools.

As money follows students from traditional public schools to charter schools, school districts must cut costs—a difficult task for large bureaucracies governed by onerous work rules and collective bargaining requirements. Ultimately, district schools may end up shuttering.

And yet—rather remarkably, given the literature showing that budget cuts tend generally to harm student achievement[ 20 ]—studies have consistently found that charter schools have positive effects on the students remaining in traditional public schools.

In Arizona,[ 21 ] Michigan,[ 22 ] Florida,[ 23 ] New York,[ 24 ] Texas,[ 25 ] and North Carolina,[ 26 ] researchers have found that nearby charter school growth or launches drive positive, if modest, academic effects on student performance in traditional public schools.

Such studies may understate the positive effect if they consider only the overall effect on traditional public schools, rather than the grade levels facing direct competition. A study that did focus on direct competition found no effects in grades that did not face charter competition and larger benefits in grades that did. A study of spillover effects in New York City showed how charters could improve traditional public schools, despite inducing budgetary stress on the district.