NY Times says its city’s charter schools can be improved, but do produce for students

Legalize School Choice

I suspect that the New York Times knows more about its city’s charter schools than a statistics guy from Jefferson County Public Schools, so a new article from that newspaper about the Big Apples’ charter schools caught my eye today.

While admitting that charters in New York can still be improved, the Times says:

“There’s little question that New York has one of the nation’s most successful charter school systems. A study published earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers.”

That would be news to some in Kentucky. On Monday, the head statistics guy at Jefferson County’s Public School District tried to tell Kentucky’s Interim Joint Committee on Education that New York’s charter success didn’t really exist. I suspect the reporters at the Times would be surprised. The Times knows a recent report from the CREDO research team at Stanford University found that growth in mathematics learning in the city’s charter schools vastly outpaced performance in the city’s traditional public schools by an astonishing equivalent of 92 extra days of instruction!

That same 2013 report from CREDO found across the country that:

“Overall, students attending charter schools have eight additional days of learning in reading and similar learning gains in math compared to their peers attending traditional public schools. While these average impacts aren’t very large, the differences for some groups of students are much greater.”

Of perhaps the greatest importance, the CREDO report shows that charter school students across the country just walk away from their traditional public school counterparts once they spend enough time in charters, usually more than one year, to derive benefits. This graph from the CREDO study, which I first showed you several days ago, makes that clear.

CREDO Years in Charter Performance Graph 2013

As this graph shows, the new CREDO study says across the nation students who have spent four or more years in their charter are more than 50 instructional days ahead of their traditional public school counterparts in reading and around 43 days ahead in math. This impressive performance certainly wasn’t included as part of the Jefferson County presentation on Monday.

So, I think reporters at the Times know a lot about this, and when you read the FULL CREDO report, Stanford researchers know charters are doing better, as well. As far as Jefferson County Schools’ understanding in this area…well, maybe not so much.