New NYC Study: Charter Schools Closing the Gap

Hitting the presses this morning:  Round 2 of Hoxby/Murarka/Kang’s epic, “gold-standard” NYC charter study.  Again, terrifically strong results. A student who spends K through 8 in a NYC charter school closes about 86% of the “Scarsdale-Harlem” achievement gap in math and 66% in English. A high schooler who spends all four years in a charter has a 28% better chance of graduating with a full Regents diploma.

Carping will be tough in this case, given the rigor of the lottery-in vs. lottery-out study design -- and the rich context the authors provide: • Are the results skewed because the research only look at schools successful enough to require lotteries? Well, no – it captures 93% of NYC’s charter students, because virtually every school has a waiting list.

• Do charters “cream”?  If so, they sure go about it in an odd way, locating in neighborhoods that are dramatically poorer, less-educated, and more full of single-parent households than other public schools.  And the lotteries wind up admitting kids who are lower-income, more Black and Hispanic, and less White and Asian than the surrounding system too.

• Are the results driven by a few high-performing charter management groups? Even though Chancellor Joel Klein has thrown down the welcome mat for top operators, about half the student population is in “freestanding” charters, with 29% in nonprofit-managed CMO schools and 20% in schools managed by for-profits. “Mom and Pops”  are rocking.

We know that top-notch authorizing from Klein and SUNY (which oversees the largest share of the city’s charters) help fuel the achievement surge. What goes on inside the schools is most telling:

• 92% of charter school students take two “internal evaluations” each year. In other words, over and above what the state requires, charters use more frequent assessments to identify students who need extra or different instruction.

• The average NYC charter school year is 192 days long. Students attend school for an extra two and a half weeks each year compared to district counterparts. And the average school day is 8 hours long -- 90 minutes more per day than the traditional public schools.

• There’s no one curricular route to success. The study says there “are no dominant math or English language arts curricula in the New York City charter schools.” About a quarter of students experience a curriculum developed by their own school or its operating agency.

• About half of charter schools students attend a school where parents are asked to sign a contract.

• For about 60% of charter school teachers, some of their pay is based on their performance and duties they undertake, rather than the seniority/credits process used systemwide.  (And, um…. Is it worth mentioning at this point that the UFT elementary was one of only 2 charters citywide that declined to participate in the study? Just asking.)

So what does it all mean?   After months of debate about the performance of public charter schools,  it’s a huge relief to see a study so rigorous yield conclusions so awesome.  It affirms that when you get the essentials right (congenial atmosphere, strong authorizing, help with facilities), the sky is the limit.  We’re never supposed to claim that charter schools are a panacea. But for thousands of city kids now within reach of college and adult success, “panacea” is too mild a word for the astounding work these charters are doing.