Achievement

Do Charter Schools Work?
Yes. In addition to the positive pressure they put on the public school system as a whole, charter schools satisfy and serve their primary constituents (teachers, parents, and students) by providing exciting and viable new education in an inclusive, individual manner. Harvard University Professor and Economist Caroline Hoxby recently released a study called “A Straightforward Comparison of Charter Schools and Regular Public Schools in the United States.” The study compared 4th grade students in charter schools with 4th graders in the public schools that the charter students would go to absent the charter option and made several important conclusions:

Compared to students in the nearest regular public school, charter students are 4 percent more likely to be proficient in reading and 2 percent more likely to be proficient in math, on their state’s exam.

Compared to students in the nearest regular public school with a similar racial composition, charter students are 5 percent more likely to be proficient in reading and 3 percent more likely to be proficient in math.

In states where charters are well established, such as Arizona and California the advantage tends to be greater.

The “Ripple” Effect: Conventional public school districts often view charter schools as a threat but time has shown that these new schools can serve a valuable teaching role. Increasingly, members of the traditional public school system are turning to charter schools for examples of “best-practices” regarding everything from curriculum to staffing and teacher retention. The attitudes of leading administrators in the conventional public school system are also changing. Instead of viewing charter schools as nuisances many realize the need for improvement spurred on by charter schools.

CMOs Have Positive Impact on Student Learning Study Shows: Charter Management Organization (CMOs) schools represent 17% of our nation’s charter schools and are showing increased effectiveness over district schools, according to a recent study. CMOs are located in urban areas of specific states with charter laws that allow CMOs to manage and have autonomy. The 2-year study looks at student achievement, teacher performance and school management. Read a summary here.

Charters Perform Well on NAEP: It’s been well documented that the 2011 NAEP scores for students have left much to be desired. Students only improved their scores by one point since 2009 and the achievement gap hasn’t budged. However, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools compared charter school scores with traditional public school scores and the results were promising. In nearly every subject and category, charter school students made much larger improvements than conventional public school students. You can read the full analysis here.

FACT-CHECKING CHARTER SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT
Why some are saying only 1 in 5 charter schools perform, and why it’s wrong:

In July 2009, CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes) published a national report on charter school achievement. The Center for Education Reform and Dr. Caroline Hoxby, among others critiqued the report’s results and methodology. That report is flawed in several ways:
It was not a national study but a study of only15 states. Forty-one states plus DC have charter school laws.
It deployed a method of comparing students in charters to “virtual twins” in traditional public schools. These children are composites of what the researchers believe the student in a traditional public school would look like, not what they DO look like. While there are virtual charter schools, there is no such thing as “virtual” student achievement.
The study did not account for any variation in grade levels of schools. Some charters run from K-3, starting a new grade each year; others start at 3 and go to 8 and so on. The number of years a student was in a charter is completely ignored.
The researchers ignored the gold standards of research that requires apples to apples comparisons. That means that the achievement of a student that is already in a charter but would have gone to the precise neighborhood school of the student to whom he is compared in the traditional public school.
The researchers ignored variations in state test rigor, reporting and data, and made comparisons of students regardless of state boundaries.
The study accounted for poverty using federal free and reduced lunch program data, which the federal research bureau that collects that data has admitted is deeply flawed, as most charters do not participate fully in the free and reduced lunch program for a variety of well- documented reasons. That does not mean they do not feed students; it means they prefer not to comply with US Department of Agriculture paperwork and regulations that are costly and often negate the funds they’d receive.

For more information on charter school achievement and why the report is flawed, please see our report Fact Checking School Achievement.

Rejection of CREDO’s Methodology
A widely touted study found deficiencies in student achievement in charters in several states by employing a method of comparing charter school students to virtual twins in traditional public schools (TPS). Despite our skepticism, the report was widely embraced, with little appreciation for the scientific flaws in the research. Dr. Caroline Hoxby has long conducted apples to apples scientific comparisons of charter school achievement. She points out that attempts to use other methods of evaluations, such as that recently used by CREDO to issue negative conclusions about charter students in several states, actually make fair comparisons almost impossible.

There are a couple of methods that should not be used because, instead of making the selection bias better, they make it dramatically worse. These methods are: (1) pure value-added and (2) matching based on students’ prior history in the traditional public schools (“TPS-history-matching”). Both methods have been used by a variety of researchers.”

To do the TPS-history-matching (as in the recent CREDO study), a researcher finds students who are currently in charter school but who were previously enrolled in traditional public schools long enough to establish a program participation history (free lunch participation, special education, English Learner services). Then, the researcher matches the charter school student to one or more students in his or her previous traditional public school. The match is based on whether the students have the same race and ethnicity, the same program participation, and similar prior test scores. The researcher compares each student to his or her matched counterparts. Also, a researcher can use the switchers’ histories to find matches for the charter school classmates of switchers, even if these classmates are not themselves switchers. The point is that the entire matching process is based on those students, and only those students, who apply to charter schools in late grades. These switchers are non- representative students and are precisely the students for whom switcher bias is most serious.

(The CREDO study also has a serious statistical problem that causes its estimates of charter schools’ effects to be negatively biased. An explanation of this problem can be found in a memo posted on the website for CER Summary Hoxby New York Charters 2009.