Surprise – Black students in good charter school systems do outperform

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The NAEP shows it

There is considerable noise “out there” about public charter schools generally performing no better than traditional public schools, much of it generated by teachers’ union supported enterprises. But, is that really the right picture?

First of all, charter schools tend to be located in low-income, inner city areas. Making a comparison of their students’ performance to performances from much wealthier kids in the suburbs, which not a few studies essentially do, isn’t going to give a very valid impression. To be fair, you need to try and compare charter school students to other students in traditional schools from the same local area.

Getting more reasonable comparisons is not so easy to do, but a few possibilities are available from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for certain very large urban school districts.

Using the NAEP Data Explorer web tool, we took a look at results in the 2019 NAEP Grade 4 and Grade 8 reading and math assessments to see if any large urban districts had reported scores for both black students in charter schools and blacks in the same district’s traditional public schools. We found two districts, Atlanta and Cleveland, where there were enough black charter students present for the NAEP to develop reasonably acceptable scores across all four areas tested.

As we assembled this NAEP data, we also included the NAEP results for the only Kentucky urban district that participates in the NAEP, the Jefferson County Public School District (JCPS). Kentucky has no charter schools, so the only JCPS scores we can show relate to the performance estimated by NAEP for all black students in JCPS’ traditional schools.

The first two tables below show what we found. Let’s look at Atlanta, first.

Very simply put, the differences in NAEP Scale Scores between black students in Atlanta’s charter schools and those black students in that city’s traditional public schools is dramatic, with charter blacks outscoring in every area listed. For example, in NAEP Grade 4 Math, black students in Atlanta’s charter schools outscored black students in the city’s traditional public schools by a very notable 19 NAEP Scale Score points.

By the way, NAEP uses a 0-to-500-point scale, but the scores don’t mean very much to most people. To make the score differences a bit easier to grasp, as a rough approximation, a number of people who work with the NAEP claim that a 10-point score difference is equivalent to an extra year of performance (examples here, here, here and here). So, you can see the NAEP indicates that Atlanta’s charters are truly doing remarkable things for their black students. That 19-point difference in Grade 4 math could indicate nearly two extra years of learning. That’s a big difference.

Also note that the Grade 4 math situation isn’t unique. In every case in the table black students in Atlanta’s charter schools notably outperform black students in the city’s traditional schools.

Now look at the JCPS NAEP results. In every case Atlanta’s charter school black students notably outperform JCPS black students. Again, the performance differential is roughly equal to years of extra learning.

Clearly, black JCPS students could really benefit from a solid charter school system like that in Atlanta.

Now, let’s examine Cleveland’s performance.

While Cleveland’s charter versus non-charter score differences are not nearly so great as those we saw in Atlanta, the differences are still quite notable even after we consider the statistical sampling error present in all NAEP scores. The NAEP Data Explorer indicates each of the differences between scores for Cleveland’s black students in charters versus those in that city’s traditional schools is statistically significant. And, those differences again point to somewhere around a year or more of extra education performance for Cleveland’s black charter students. Note as well that black students in Cleveland’s charter schools outperform black students in JCPS by notable amounts, as well.

I wish the NAEP could provide more examples like Atlanta and Cleveland for other large urban districts that participate in the NAEP, but unfortunately in many cases the 2019 NAEP didn’t test enough black students in charter schools in other districts to permit development of reasonably accurate score estimates. The sampling errors were just too large, so NAEP declined to report any charter school scores.

One disappointing example of an urban district that simply didn’t get scores reported for black charter students in 2019 is the District of Columbia school system. This is especially disappointing because back in the 2017 NAEP, the DC schools were more effectively sampled and the NAEP Data Explorer allowed assembling the following table. 

The DC differences in 2017 generally are a little smaller than those Cleveland got in 2019, but as of 2017 even the nation’s capitol’s schools showed blacks in charter schools outperforming blacks in that city’s traditional public schools by statistically significant amounts.

So, the bottom line here is that black students in well-run charter school systems can, and have, shown clear performance advantages over their counterparts in traditional schools.

It is unfortunate that at this time Kentucky does not allow its students to have the same benefits of public charter schools that blacks now enjoy in a number of other parts of the nation. It’s time for that to change.