Last year the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University published a report on the way charter schools perform for inner city students in some of the nation’s major urban areas. In its “Urban Charter School Study, March 2015” report, CREDO provides two graphs that show the relative performance of those urban charter systems compared to the traditional public schools (TPS) in the same areas.

The findings are very interesting, showing clear advantages for charter schools in many urban areas.

Figure 1 below is adopted from CREDO’s chart on Page 24 in the report. I replaced the standard deviation legend for the horizontal axis with the more easily understood days of extra learning legend using a conversion table found on Page 23 in the CREDO report.

Figure 1

There are some very interesting things going on in Figure 1.CREDO says:

“• 26 charter sectors have positive impacts in math and 11 charter sectors have negative impacts in math relative to the sectors’ local TPS. The remaining 4 charter sectors provide similar levels of growth.”

“• Gains for charter students in the SF Bay Area, Boston, D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, New York City, and Newark are much stronger than their TPS peers in Math.”

The differential results for top performing charters are a remarkable feature of the graph. Boston leads the pack with its charter school students posting about an extra 235 days of extra learning compared to that city’s traditional public school students. With a normal school year usually running about 180 days (Kentucky’s is 177 days), Boston charter students are about one and one-third school years ahead of the non-charter students in “Bean Town.”

Dropping down the grouping somewhat, the Southern city of Memphis still gets about 100 days more learning in its charter students than its traditional schools provide.

There is a similar situation in reading, as Figure 2 on Page 25 in the CREDO report shows. Again, I converted CREDO’s standard deviation figures into the days of learning format.

Figure 2

CREDO concludes:

“• For reading, charters in 23 regions have positive impacts while in 10 regions their learning gains are smaller than local TPS.”

“• The Bay Area, Boston, Memphis, Nashville, and Newark stand out with respect to annual gains for charter school students in reading.”

Overall, the results from this most recent CREDO study show charters in a number of different school systems in both the North and the South outperform their nearby traditional public school neighbors that normally would serve the same students.

Here are some more of CREDO’s key findings:

“• When all of the urban regions are pooled together, urban charter schools on average provide significantly greater growth in math and reading than urban TPS with similar students.”

“• Specifically, students enrolled in urban charter schools receive the equivalent of 40 additional days of learning growth (0.055 s.d.’s) in math and 28 days of additional growth (0.039 s.d.’s) in reading compared to their matched peers in TPS.”

Repeating a finding found in all the earlier CREDO studies I have seen, the 2015 report says:

“• The longer students stay enrolled in charter schools, the larger the annual benefit of charter attendance becomes. By the time a student spends four or more years enrolled in an urban charter school, their annual academic growth is 108 days greater in math and 72 days greater in reading per year than their peers in TPS.”

Another CREDO finding is worth closing on:

“• Mirroring the national charter sector, disadvantaged students receive the strongest positive benefits in urban charter schools. Black and Hispanic students, students in poverty, English language learners, and students receiving special education services all see stronger growth in urban charters than their matched peers in urban TPS.”

These are exactly the sorts of students that continuously under-perform in Kentucky.

Based on the new results from the 2016 Unbridled Learning report, charter schools can offer important benefits to Kentucky, especially in some of our larger population areas like Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky. The continued resistance to charters, driven largely by adult interests in our traditional public school system that don’t want competition – or to be shown up, does a great disservice to the state’s neediest students. It is time to put such selfish adult interests aside and move on, as 43 other states and the District of Columbia’s school systems already have, to embrace school choice options like charter schools in Kentucky. It’s time to do what is right for kids.