Here are some interesting facts from the Alliance for Public Charter Schools, with a few added comments from me:

• Children who attend charter schools are more likely to graduate from high school than their traditional school peers. And dozens of charter schools across the country have 100 percent college acceptance rates for their graduating seniors.

• New Orleans has a higher percentage of children in charter schools than anywhere else in the country. Students attending public charter schools in New Orleans learn an additional four months in reading and five months in math more than their peers attending traditional public schools.

• Statewide, students attending public charter schools in Louisiana gained an additional 50 days of learning in reading and 65 days in math compared to their peers attending traditional public schools. (And, in 2013 ACT college entrance testing, both Kentucky and Louisiana tested 100 percent of their graduates on the ACT. Louisiana outscored Kentucky for every single racial group that ACT lists in its state profile reports for these two states)

• At one charter school in Arizona, BASIS, students scored higher on an international test called the PISA than students from anywhere in the world.

• At the Success Academy charter school in Harlem, every fourth grader passed the state’s science exam. While the Alliance didn’t identify the specific school, all the Success Academy charters in Harlem list almost exclusive minority enrollment.

In Kentucky, statewide only 68.5 percent of our elementary school students were proficient in our hold-over, watered down CATS-era science test. Even in Kentucky’s most upper-scale elementary school, the Anchorage Independent School, only 93 percent were proficient on this watered down test. (Source: Kentucky Department of Education’s School Report Card website)

• In 2012, every high school senior at an Uncommon charter school took the SAT exam, achieving an average score that was 20 points above the College Board’s benchmark for college readiness.

Here in Kentucky, in Louisville’s top magnet high school, Dupont Manual, only 84.7 percent met the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education’s (CPE) college readiness benchmark score for the ACT math assessment. For reading, only 88.5 percent of Manual’s students met the CPE benchmark. (Also from the Kentucky School Report Card website)