Helping students recover from pandemic learning loss is a vital, ongoing job with a ticking clock. Many students impacted by school closures, ineffective remote education practices, inconsistent reopening policies, and long-term chronic absenteeism have already graduated or dropped out. Those who remain deserve the best possible methods and efforts teachers and school leaders can employ to help them catch up. A new working paper looks at the difference in academic performance between charter school and traditional district school students—the second such statewide analysis after Fordham’s own work in Ohio—to determine who is doing the best job so far of getting their kids back on track.
Student-level data come from the Tennessee Department of Education and cover the 2017–18 to 2022–23 school years. 2020–21 is considered “during the pandemic,” the years following are considered “post-pandemic,” and the years before are used to set test score baselines for the purposes of the analysis. A unique student identifier includes the schools students attend, their grade levels, and their test scores from the state’s math and English language arts (ELA) assessments in grades 3–12. The trio of researchers, including Fordham/AEI EEPS scholar Adam Kho, include only schools that were open for all the academic years under study and exclude all students who made nonstructural school switches in that time (that is, changing schools for reasons other than moving from elementary to middle or middle to high school), as well as all students who switched school type after the start of the pandemic. Students in magnet, virtual, alternative, and optional enrollment schools are also excluded.
Kho and his colleagues compare the test score performance of charter school students to that of closely-matched peers attending traditional district schools, with several robustness checks to ensure that the two groups are as similar as possible. The results are reported statewide, by school type (elementary, middle, and high schools), and in the two metro areas—Nashville and Memphis—where the majority of charter schools are located. Those results show that charter and district students performed comparably during the pandemic in 2020–21, relative to baseline, with only one statistically-significant difference (Nashville-area charter students outperformed their district peers in ELA). Post-pandemic, however, charter school students consistently outperformed their district peers—statewide and in the Nashville area—in both math and ELA over both school years studied. The statewide effect estimates, all statistically significant, ranged from 0.05 to 0.14 standard deviations (SD), while estimates from the broader Nashville region ranged from 0.06 to 0.17 SD. In the Memphis area, charter students outperformed district students in math (0.08 SD) and performed similarly to their peers in ELA. These positive impacts were concentrated in elementary and middle schools, while charter and district high school students performed similarly.
The researchers note that charter schools in Tennessee largely mirrored the pandemic-era closing and opening protocols utilized by the districts in which they were located, including allowing parents to choose virtual or in-person options and periods of closure where in-person students switched to virtual instruction based on disease surge data. Thus, all indications are that Tennessee charter schools specifically upped their game considerably in the post-pandemic period in response to the fear of learning loss for their students, even before any data were available to illustrate such a loss. Kho and his colleagues suggest that the autonomy and flexibility inherent in the charter school model—as compared to larger, more rigid, more bureaucratic traditional school districts—were key to their relatively quick success in boosting student achievement.
The Education Scorecard concurs that Tennessee has made some strong strides in recovery overall, recently ranking third among all the states in math recovery and ninth in reading between 2019 and 2024. But Volunteer State students are still not out of the woods yet. Whatever these charter schools are doing needs to be defined, replicated, and expanded in all schools, stat.
SOURCE: Adam Kho, Shelby L. Smith, and Ron Zimmer, “From Disruption to Recovery: Charter School Performance During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (July 2025).
