Who says charter schools don’t perform? Take a look at a New York City story!

My friends at the Education Consumers Foundation have a really neat tool in their web site that allows you to generate graphs of poverty rates (Generally based on eligibility for the federal school lunch program) and Grade 3 Reading proficiency rates for all sorts of combinations. They have data online for all 50 states (Kentucky included), and you can also generate data just for specific school districts.

The district the graph below looks at is the enormous New York City (NYC) public school system, which includes both public charter schools and schools operated with traditional governance. The graphing tool allowed Education Consumers to break out schools by both type, charter or traditional, and into one of three different bands based on the percentage of minority students each school enrolls.

In the graph below, the charter schools’ performances are show with red symbols, with charter schools that have greater than two-thirds minority enrollment shown by red triangles, charters with one-third to two-thirds minority enrollment in red circles, and low minority schools shown by red squares. 

Chart Source : https://education-consumers.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/NYC-2019-minority-poverty-proficiency1jes.pdf

Perhaps the first thing you noticed as you looked at the graph is how the red high minority charter school triangles predominantly plot out high on the right side. That area of the graph is where high poverty meets much better reading proficiency rates. So, not only are these schools high minority (shown by the red triangle symbol) but they are high poverty, as well.

Some other things also leap off this graphic:

• Hardly any NYC charter school is low-minority. I only see one square in the graph,

• There are only about a dozen charter schools with even mid-range minority enrollment.

• The vast majority of NYC charters, multiple dozens of them, have high minority enrollment.

This pretty much blows some myths about charters clear out of the water, at least as far as NYC’s school system goes. The “red triangle” charter schools are not serving elite, white students. They are serving high-poverty minority kids.

The next myth is that charters don’t perform well compared to traditional schools. Well, forget that myth at least as far as NYC goes. There are A LOT of green symbols (for the traditional schools) well below, and too the left, of the high poverty, high minority charters in NYC.

In fact, some of the charters along the top right edge of the graph are doing just as well as some of the low-minority, traditional schools found at the far-left side of the graph where poverty rates are MUCH lower.

I should mention the Education Consumers Foundation focuses on Grade 3 reading results for some really good reasons. One of the key ones is easy to understand: starting in Grade 4, the K-12 curriculum across the nation assumes students are now ready to read to learn. In Kindergarten to Grade 3, in comparison, we assume students are still learning to read. Given the change in curriculum design in Grade 4, if students leave the third grade as weak or essentially non-readers, they will almost inevitably have major problems with the rest of their educational experience.

So, Grade 3 reading is an important waypoint in student progress. And, just looking at the graph above, you can see elementary level charter schools in NYC are doing a far better job preparing their students for the new challenges students will face beginning in Grade 4.

As Kentucky’s legislature, governor, and court system work through the challenges of setting up a vibrant charter school system in Kentucky, I hope they all get to see this blog. There is no reason why Kentucky should continue to deny its many poor and minority students access to better education programs such as public charter schools. The Bluegrass State does a disservice to its children so long as it attempts to operate a public school system without this and other productive school choice options that, as NYC shows, work for kids.