Research Rewind: Back to Basics, Quality Matters

It’s no secret that the performance of charter schools varies quite a bit. With over 5,000 charter schools and wide variety in mission, vision and instructional focus, examining charter schools as a whole will lead to a mixed bag of results. Research is moving in the direction of identifying the educational conditions that may lead to differences in results, but there is still much to learn about effective practices.

As the year comes to a close, let’s step back and ask a very basic school choice question: what happens when students choose high quality schools?

A series of studies on a district-wide open enrollment school choice policy in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina provide some answers. The studies are sophisticated by design, but offer straightforward results:

• Families who selected schools based on academic quality (higher school performance), rather than by the proximity of schools or the student demographic make-up of schools, experienced significant gains in test scores as a result of attending the higher quality school.
• Students zoned to low-quality neighborhood schools who won lotteries to attend higher quality high schools were more likely than students who lost the lotteries and attended lower quality neighborhood schools to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor’s degree. Moreover, these students were twice as likely to attend an elite university.
• Families who received direct and easy-to-read information on school test scores selected higher-scoring schools for their children. And again, the researchers found that attending higher performing schools led to better academic outcomes for the students.

These studies should motivate the charter school sector. The studies do not support school choice for school choice’s sake. And the studies don’t suggest that school choice is very effective when families choose schools for non-academic reasons. Rather, the studies provide concrete evidence that when families use school choice to select higher performing schools, their children perform better.

The charter sector has to use evidence like this to ensure quality and uphold the charter school bargain—autonomy in exchange for accountability. Consistently low performing charter schools should not be allowed to stay open. Instead, the sector should be working to provide more high quality options to families. If the charter sector can define what academic quality looks like and guarantee that every charter school is a very good option for students, widespread results will follow.

Charters can ‘TUDA’ their own horns

The recently released NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) includes breakouts for charter public schools and traditional public schools in six out of 21 districts assessed. The table below shows that charter schools outperformed traditional public schools in the majority of districts in both subject areas and grade levels. In all of the other instances, charter schools performed as well as traditional public schools (e.g., the differences in scores were not statistically significant). In both the 2009 and 2011 NAEP TUDA, charter schools never underperformed against traditional public schools.

Others have pointed to the limited number of districts in NAEP with both charter and traditional public school data to compare. A larger sampling of charter schools in big districts like DC, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Diego could allow for further analyses of NAEP performance trends at the district level.

The NAEP assessment does have limitations, as we have discussed in previous blogs. Moreover, comparing a snapshot of student performance between charters and traditional public schools does not control for the potential bias of students selecting to attend charter schools. However, the large differences below deserve attention and further analysis.

2011 NAEP, Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA)  for Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Data compiled by NAPCS from: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/dataset.aspx
Note: CPS – Charter Public School; TPS – Traditional Public School; N/A – insufficient data to compare CPS and TPS; ↔ – no statistically significant difference in the scores

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