Charter Schools Are Doing Good Work - Every Community Needs One.
New Study Shows Charters Lift Up African-American and Hispanic Students.
In June, the Center for Research on Education Outcome (CREDO) at Stanford University released a new version of their National Charter School Study. This is the third version of this study, the previous two having been conducted in 2009 and 2013. Unfortunately, Georgia’s charter schools were not included in this new version of the study, apparently because the Georgia Department of Education did not give CREDO access to the necessary data. That’s a shame.
Nevertheless, the State Charter School Commission (SCSC) compared state authorized charter school growth scores to the growth scores of traditional public schools the students would otherwise attend, following the CREDO study methodology. While this analysis did not include charter schools authorized by local Boards of Education, we can still learn things about how about half of Georgia’s charter schools are performing.
According to a press release from the SCSC the key takeaways are:
Charter school academic growth compared to local traditional schools is rising nationally. The number of state charter schools in Georgia with higher progress scores than the local traditional schools increased from 2015 to 2019, with over half outperforming in the most recent school year for which data are available 2021-2022.
Students of color perform better in charter schools. Nationally, the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students attending charters grew by large margins relative to their peers attending traditional public schools. In Georgia, the share of majority-minority state charter schools outperforming their local traditional school comparisons rose dramatically from 17 percent to 60 percent between 2015 and 2019.
Charter schools yield better academic performance for students living in poverty. From 2015 to 2019, the academic progress of charter school students living in poverty nationwide surpassed that of their peers attending traditional public schools. In 2015, Georgia had 11 state charter schools serving large populations of economically disadvantaged students, and only one had higher growth scores than the traditional local schools. However, by 2019, the number climbed to eight out of 17.
The SCSC analysis mirrors the result of the CREDO study in all areas except one: Georgia’s virtual charter schools are performing better than virtual charter schools nationally, as explained here:
The instructional delivery model matters and varies by location. At the national level, student performance in fully online charter schools floundered across the five-year period compared to traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Conversely, in Georgia, virtual state charters showed significant progress during the same period. By 2021-2022, both statewide virtual charter schools outperformed their traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts in several grades.
Analyzing the national CREDO study, journalist Jonathan Chait wrote
This is not just a handful of exceptional schools here and there. A large number of charter schools have developed scalable models that can allow Black and Latino students in cities with awful neighborhood schools to get the same education as white kids in suburbs enjoy.
Skeptics point out, accurately, that charter schools do not solve every problem in public education. What they do solve is one particularly important problem: the fact that generation after generation of Black and brown kids come through the school system years behind their affluent suburban peers. This achievement gap is a social crisis of the highest order. Indeed, many of the most bitter fights in American society concern its downstream effects. Affirmative action is a worthwhile but far less effective way to compensate for the deeper problem that American schools produce scandalously few high-achieving Black and Latino graduates.
It is difficult for me to understand why, in the face of evidence that charter schools can make such a large difference for this neglected cohort, they are so often met with fatalism or antipathy.
Chait, with whom I rarely agree, is correct. Policymakers in Georgia and elsewhere, should wholeheartedly embrace charter schools models that work. Then open up access to them to students in every community, especially African-American and Hispanic students zoned for poor performing schools.