Here’s the top-line takeaway from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes’s (CREDO) comprehensive Urban Charter Schools Report, which is meant to measure the effectiveness of these schools of choice: For low-income urban families, charter schools are making a significant difference. Period.
CREDO looked at charter schools in forty-one urban areas between school years 2006–07 and 2011–12. Compared to traditional public schools in the same areas, charters collectively provide “significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading”—the equivalent of forty days of additional learning per year in math and twenty-eight additional days in reading. As a group, urban charters have been particularly good for black, Hispanic, and English language learner (ELL) subpopulations. Indeed, putting the word “urban” before the phrase “charter school” is becoming somewhat redundant. As Sara Mead recently pointed out, urban students comprise only a quarter of students nationally, but more than half (56 percent) of those enrolled in charters. Thus, perhaps the most encouraging finding in the study is that the learning gains associated with urban charter schools seem to be accelerating. In the 2008–09 school year, CREDO found charter attendance producing an average of twenty-nine additional days of learning for students in math and twenty-four additional days of learning in reading. By 2011–12, it was fifty-eight additional days of math and forty-one of reading.
Not all that glitters is gold, of course. There’s no inherent magic to the word “charter” on the front door of a school. The relative success of urban charters in the aggregate makes all the more frustrating the failure of some charters in places like El Paso, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, which not only fail to match the results of their district counterparts, but significantly underperform them. The new study underscores several challenges and suggests that the sector’s weaker performers form “sister city” relationships with stronger near-neighbors. Orlando and Fort Myers, for example, might want to emulate the work of Miami’s charter sector with ELL students, “who see the equivalent of 112 additional days of learning per year in math relative to their peers in TPS.” Another question to be asked—especially in places like San Francisco, Boston, Newark, Washington, D.C., and New York, where charter pupils seem to do particularly well compared to district schools—is the degree to which charters’ apparent success is a function of comparisons to weak traditional schools.
But if you are the low-income parent of a child in one of those places, such questions might not interest you very much. If your child is black, Hispanic, or an ELL in particular, here’s what you need to know: Charter schools are making a significant difference. Period.
SOURCE: “Urban Charter School Study Report on 41 Regions,” Center for Research on Education Outcomes (March 2015).
