Wow! National Study: Charters Outperform Traditional Schools
Education-reform skeptics’ favorite fact is officially false
New York Magazine isn’t exactly a hotbed of conservatism, but its Intelligencer is featuring a new article, National Study Shows Charters Outperform Traditional Schools: Education-reform skeptics’ favorite fact is officially false, and for a limited time, you can access it for free. The article discusses new research from the now famous (some would say infamous) CREDO research crowd at Stanford University.
Just a few key items and observations related to a quick review of the Intelligencer article and the new CREDO study:
In 2009 CREDO released a study that showed charter schools didn’t perform well. Now, the third report in this CREDO series (#2 came out in 2013) shows charter schools outperforming. In other words, charters got better over time, which is what you would expect with a new innovation.
Charter management organizations, or CMOs, which is a network of charter schools, as opposed to a single, individually operated charter school…produced greater learning gains than stand-alone charters.
One of the new CREDO report’s key findings says, “…more than 1,000 schools have eliminated learning disparities for their students and moved their achievement ahead of their respective state’s average performance. We refer to these schools as “gap-busting” charter schools. They provide strong empirical proof that high-quality, high-equality education is possible anywhere. More critically, we found that dozens of CMOs have created these results across their portfolios, demonstrating the ability to scale equitable education that can change lives.”
The Intelligencer points out that, “A large number of charter schools have developed scalable models that can allow Black and Latino students in cities with awful neighborhood schools to get the same education as white kids in suburbs enjoy.” This is really crucial in Kentucky because the state’s Black students are having a particularly hard time in the traditional public school system. For example, in 2022 testing with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Kentucky’s Grade 8 Black students only scored 9% proficient or above and a really upsetting 68% scored in the lowest achievement level of “Below Basic,” which means these students didn’t even have just a partial mastery of Grade 8 math.
One of the things even the original CREDO report showed is that students who attend charter schools for more school terms do start to outperform their traditional public school counterparts. That trend continues to be reported in the new CREDO report in this figure found on Page 59.
This is a very important finding even though CREDO has not put much emphasis on it over the years. The results graphed in the figure show that students who only have been in charters for one year need more time to show the benefits charters can offer. But, over time the benefits continue to mount up in favor of charter school attendance. This also means that studies that don’t look at results for students with more time in charters will tend to under-value charter schools, which helps explain some of the findings in earlier reports that certainly don’t agree with the latest CREDO effort.
There is a lot more to learn in both the Intelligencer article (again, only limited time free availability) and the CREDO report. With the Kentucky legislature slated to take up serious solutions for Kentucky’s currently school choice devoid landscape in 2024, now is the time to get up to speed on the real charter school situation today, not some made up stories enemies of school choice would have you believe.