The Takeaway From Hopes, Fears and Reality

The release this week of the National Charter School Research Project’s annual report, Hopes, Fears, & Reality highlights the range of differences across public charter schools that limit sweeping generalizations about how charter schools are designed, operate, and perform.  Whether you look at student performance, core instructional practices, academic mission, students served, or the way in which charter schools contract for services, public charter schools prove to be more different from one another than alike.  In addition to identifying these areas where there are pronounced differences across charter schools, the report addresses the underlying, lingering and perhaps foremost question for charter friend and foe: are public charter schools differentiating themselves from traditional public schools in ways that improve public education?

Not surprisingly, the answer that emerges from the report is that it is difficult to disentangle the differences across public charter schools from the differences between charters and traditional public schools, especially when charter schools are studied as a uniform group.  When we are able to say something about the charter school effect, it is because differences in the way that charter schools operate are identified and controlled for.

In the first chapter (see full report) Julian Betts and Emily Tang provide the most solid review to date of the empirical research on how charter schools perform compared with traditional public schools.  What the authors find is that the most sophisticated research techniques show charters generally outperforming comparable public schools—although, perplexingly, not at the high school level (not included in the report are two promising studies that show positive effects for high schools students in Chicago and Florida).  Specifically, the findings suggest that public charter schools have the strongest positive effects in elementary school reading and middle school math.  Furthermore, the magnitude of the positive effect sizes is relatively large when compared with other school reform efforts such as reducing class size.  However, there are states and grade levels where the public charter schools are underperforming compared to traditional public schools.  If we only looked at average charter school effects, these differences would not come into view.

The clear limitation to the achievement findings is that Betts and Tang’s review of 13 eligible studies covers a mere 9 states.  On the one hand, the number of states is limited because the included studies use the best data to infer the value-added from attending charter schools—longitudinal, student-level data.  Conversely, there are only 13 studies in 9 states because not nearly enough high quality research on charter schools has been conducted. With charter schools operating in 40 states and the District of Columbia and 300 to 400 charter schools opening each year, we do not have definitive answers to the question of how charter schools impact students across the nation.  Moreover, the clear differences in the way that charter schools function suggests that we need to learn much more about what types of charter schools provide excellent learning environments and under what conditions.

Anna Nicotera, Director of Research and Evaluation, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools