Why Kentucky should not delay charter schools – Evidence from New York City schools

As I wrote yesterday, there are comments floating about that Kentucky should delay funding charter schools due to the state’s general financial pinch. But, if the goal is better education, I don’t think that is a very good idea.

Yesterday I pointed to evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that charter schools do a much better job for black students in eighth grade math, a racial group and academic subject where Kentucky has particularly severe problems.

Today, we look at some evidence from the October 2017 study of New York City’s charter schools by the CREDO research group at Stanford University.

In particular, this figure from that report shows the Big Apple’s charter school students do dramatically better as they spend more years in the charter school environment.

CREDO 2017 NYC Report Figure 7 Effects by Years of Enrollment in Charters

For example, by the time a NYC charter student has spent four years in that school of choice, he is ahead by about “68 days of additional learning in reading and 97 more days in math.”

What is particularly surprising is that while reading performance is actually lower compared to the traditional schools for first-year charter students, even math performance moves ahead notably in the first year by the equivalent of about two extra months of learning. That is hard to do because students generally bring a lot of problems to charter schools and other CREDO reports generally show it takes more than one year for students to adjust to charters and better learning opportunities.

In any event, given Kentucky’s major problems with math, this new CREDO study adds more evidence that delaying charters in Kentucky is really just denying students an opportunity to get a better education.