A recent American Enterprise Institute study dispels myths about charter schools by comparing them to nearby district schools in a few novel ways.
Author Nat Malkus gathered data on school type, locale, enrollment, proficiency, discipline rates, demographics, and the number of English language learners and special education students they serve. Sources included the National Center for Education Statistics, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, and EDfacts.
Instead of looking at large groups of charter and districts schools across the country or a state, as charter opponents are wont to do, Malkus compares each charter school to five neighboring district schools that a given charter student might otherwise attend. Obviously, this makes for much more of an apples-to-apples comparison.
A recurring theme throughout virtually all of Malkus’s analyses is the great amount of variance between charter schools. He compares randomly selected district schools, which he terms “reference schools,” to five neighboring district schools, just as he did with the charters. Through the study’s various lenses—school discipline, student enrollment, achievement, or something else—charter schools are repeatedly shown to differ more from one another than district schools do. (There is also more variance between charters than between charter schools and their matched district schools.)
This is borne out by the report’s important findings on charter school discipline. Contrary to popular belief, the charters he studied weren’t plagued by significantly higher suspension rates than nearby district schools. Indeed, regardless of whether one looks at schools with rates that are high, low, or middling nationally, the difference in suspension rates between sectors was no greater than three percentage points. Moreover, charter schools were twice as likely as reference district schools to exhibit comparatively low out-of-school suspension rates. They were also, however, twice as likely to claim comparatively high rates—a prime example of the aforementioned variance.
Similar patterns appeared in student achievement and demographics. Compared to neighborhood district schools, 23 percent of charters had substantially lower rates of proficiency, while 28 percent had substantially higher rates. Likewise, 12 percent of charter schools had substantially fewer white students than nearby schools, and 16 percent had substantially more.
These findings also buck another accusation commonly thrown at charter schools—that they “cream skim.” As Malkus writes, “If charters were generally cream skimming, we would expect to see more uniform differences, with charters having fewer poor black and low-performing students and more white, non-poor, and high-performing students.”
The one area that might give charter proponents pause is special education enrollment. Malkus finds that charter schools do tend to enroll fewer such students than neighboring district schools. For example, 50 percent of the charter schools he examined had a special education enrollment of less than 10 percent, whereas only 24 percent of the neighboring district schools did. And at the other end of the spectrum, only 13 percent of charters had special education enrollment rates of 20 percent or more—seven percentage points less than nearby district schools.
Malkus nevertheless denies that this is evidence of skimming, citing both insufficient research to support that assertion and studies that have found other factors to be responsible for the gap (such as parents of students with disabilities being less likely to apply to charters in the first place).
Overall, the study’s greatest strength is its demonstration of the pitfalls of unsophisticated charter-district comparisons. Charters are too diverse to be compared as a unit, and their settings tend to be too urban to be compared to all district schools. As the author suggests, future studies of charters should move away from more broad generalizations and account for the diversity in charter school options that they were intentionally created to provide.
SOURCE: Nat Malkus, “Differences on Balance: National Comparisons of Charter and Traditional Public Schools,” American Enterprise Institute (August 2016).
