New Reports on Charter School Impacts

Brookings just released The Impact of Milwaukee Charter Schools on Student Achievement. Among its findings: charter school attendance is associated with higher scores on mathematics exams than attendance at traditional public schools, but there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school attendance and performance on reading exams. These positive results are due to student performance in the initial years of the program—the performance of charter schools and traditional public schools is statistically indistinguishable for the most recent years of the study.

Interesting…especially because in the first year of the study (school year 2000), which showed the largest advantage for charter schools, the sample included only 4 charter schools. The most recent year (school year 2006—in which the authors actually found a statistically significant advantage for reading scores in traditional schools), they included 35. In the report, they give great weight to the fact that first year charters tend to have a negative impact on test scores, which could account for the decline in overall performance. However, in school year 2005, the study included 38 schools…which suggests that few if any new schools were included the 2006 data [because otherwise they would have had to eliminate several previously included schools, which doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense]. Might another idea be that charters performend better in the early years because the early charters were given only to the very best of the applicants, whereas a current push to increase the number of charter schools has led to less impressive applicants being granted charters? This notion has implications for Obama’s push to lift caps on charter schools…

Another interesting finding from this report: student mobility has a negative effect on performance and is a more robust predictor of student performance than the organizational factors the authors considered (which seems to me, as a teacher who dealt with student mobility, be a “duh” statement). Also, the positive impact of charters relative to traditional public schools declines as the number of years a student has attended a charter school increases (this could be really interesting to delve into…).

If you are interested in learning more about the impact of charter schools, check out this new RAND publication, How Charter Schools Affect Student Outcomes. It presents a much more complete picture [and actually incorporates the Milwaukee data used in the Brookings report]. The most promising results for charter supporters: The long-term outcomes of high-school graduation and college entry—in the two locations with available data on these attainment outcomes (Chicago and Florida), charter high schools appear to have substantial positive impacts, increasing the probability of graduating by 7 to 15 percentage points and increasing the probability of enrolling in college by 8 to 10 percentage points.

Labels: charter, research