The Education Freedom Institute (EFI) recently released the newest iteration of its charter ecosystem rankings, its third such effort to gauge the health of states’ charter-school sectors. The mission is still the same—shifting the focus of ranking schema to how a state’s schools are actually performing and serving students, rather than how conducive their laws are to charter establishment, support, and growth (which is what other national organizations’ rating systems have typically focused on). But how well have the authors achieved their goal and crafted an ideal ranking system?
The authors, Benjamin Scafidi and Eric Wearne of Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, combine four statewide measures of charter school accessibility and academic success to craft their rankings: Accessibility comprises the percentage of a state’s students who attend charter schools and the percentage of students residing in a zip code that contains a charter school serving their grade. The former gauge is straightforward enough, but the latter tends to bias the rankings against states that limit charters to urban communities and/or low-performing districts. On the academic success front, the authors use the aggregate reading and math test score performance for all charter students as compared to how these students would have performed if they had instead attended a traditional district school.[1]
Accessibility measures come from publicly available data frome 2021–22 while achievement data are drawn from CREDO’s 2023 National Charter School Study III. The rankings include 29 states and the District of Columbia, and exclude states whose data are incomplete or too recent to be properly comparable. The components are scored individually, with the highest-performing state given 30 points and the lowest-performing one given 1 point—the others ranked in order in between. Then the point totals are added together, with the Academic Success measures comprising 60 percent and the Accessibility measures counting for 40 percent of each state’s total score.
According to EFI, the top five charter locales are Rhode Island, New York, Michigan, the District of Columbia, and Colorado. In line with the 60/40 split, their scores were driven by the relatively strong academic performance of those states’ charters versus their district peers. For example, Rhode Island’s accessibility rankings were average to just-above average, but charter students in the state gained a whopping 90.2 extra days of instruction in reading and 87.9 days in math compared to their district counterparts.
What does all this mean? Scafidi and Wearne emphasize the importance of considering student outcomes, which other national organizations don’t do in their rankings. “What experts consider well-written laws,” they opine, “do not always produce actual charter schools, and those schools do not always result in increased achievement by students.” They are hopeful that state and national policymakers will eventually favor their more outcomes-driven analysis, especially in this third iteration. However, they note that any statewide snapshot of the charter sector—even theirs—should only be used as a “first-pass” when considering the performance of charter schools in a given state. These aggregated data “may not reflect what is happening in a specific community” at a specific point in time, and especially may lag behind where that state’s charter school ecosystem is currently at or may be headed in the near future. If lots more charters are scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, for example, 2023 accessibility scores will be far lower than they will be during the next review. And low charter performance on a statewide measure could mask the fact that any single charter school could be the very best-performing option near a given family’s home.
Another important issue is the inclusion of online charter schools in CREDO’s data, which has a big impact on the EFI ratings. Consider Fordham’s home state of Ohio, ranked 27th, rising above only Oregon, Indiana, and South Carolina. Ohio ranks low in the accessibility categories (in part because its plentiful charters are limited to urban locales), but does especially poorly in academic outcomes, with charter students actually losing days of instruction in both reading and math to their traditional district peers, according to CREDO. Yet such analyses fail to control for the well-documented academic struggles of online schools, which make up nearly 30 percent of the Buckeye State’s charter sector, and have often distorted CREDO’s Ohio charter analyses. Indeed, a 2020 Ohio State analysis commissioned by Fordham found that brick-and-mortar charter schools boosted math and ELA test scores for grades 4–8 above their district counterparts, with impacts especially pronounced among Black students.
Despite these methodological concerns, however, EFI’s analysis continues to add food for thought around what makes for a “good” charter school sector. And for that, it deserves to be taken seriously.
SOURCE: Benjamin Scafidi and Eric Wearne, “EFI Charter School Ecosystem Rankings 2024,” Education Economics Center, Kennesaw State University (April 2024).
[1] More on the methodology used by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford (or CREDO) and used in this analysis can be found here: https://ncss3.stanford.edu/methods-data/methodology/
