It’s National School Choice Week. It's also time to allow Kentucky's students to join the school-choice success bandwagon.

It’s National School Choice Week, and other states that have already enacted school choice programs like charter schools and student scholarships funded by either tax supported vouchers or non-tax supported private contributions are going to have some interesting results to discuss.

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But, for Kentucky’s kids, this week only serves as a promise that in time even they will someday enjoy programs that are really starting to work elsewhere

After all, data reported for 2021 show there were 7,821 charter schools alone in the United States enrolling 3,695,769 students. Ten years earlier, there were only 5,342 charter schools enrolling 1,792,997 students. So, the number of charters has risen nearly 50% in the past decade and enrollment in them has more than doubled. Charters must be getting something right.

Even Puerto Rico and Guam have charter schools.

But there are no charters in Kentucky, and with a lawsuit now filed against 2022 legislation that would have finally provided funding to start charters in the Bluegrass State, the future is in doubt.

That’s a real shame for Kentucky’s students because charters elsewhere are starting to produce some attention-getting results.

I wrote about one example last May in Oh, My! Blacks in Georgia's Charter Schools Now Tie Kentucky's White Students in Math and Reading! The data presented in that blog, repeated below in Table 1, shows that in the last pre-COVID administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Black students in Georgia’s public charter schools actually tied scores for white students in Kentucky’s traditional public schools. Quite simply, the achievement gaps in this case were gone.

Table 1

Now, we have a more recent example from the 2022 NAEP that charter schools in states with solid programs are starting to achieve attention-getting results. This time, the example is for Hispanic students in public charter schools in Florida.

In the 2022 NAEP, Hispanics in the public charter schools in Florida now score essentially the same as white public school students in Kentucky. That’s great news for Florida.

Table 2

I’d like to show you more examples, but at present the NAEP doesn’t report a lot of information about charter school performance by race due to small sample sizes. That sample size issue was made worse in 2022 when the NAEP further reduced its target sample sizes all across the nation.

Still, it’s remarkable when, in other states, the performance of public school minority students — who often get left behind when it comes to academic achievement — now equals that of Kentucky’s white public school students. It’s time to allow Kentucky’s students to join this success bandwagon.

NAEP scores extracted from the NAEP Data Explorer.