New Study Says Charter Schools Only Improve Education

By The Heartland Institute

A new study by the RAND Corporation found charter schools do not harm conventional public schools and charter students are more likely to graduate high school and go on to college than other public school children.

The study took a closer examination of the topic than any previously released, according to its authors. Researchers mapped the test scores and post-graduation achievement of millions of students at thousands of schools.

“Charter Schools in Eight States: Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition,” released in March, examines the charter school movement in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, plus individual districts in Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Diego.

“We got together a group of researchers so we could put together data from all these different sites and examine them in a consistent and rigorous way,” said Brian Gill, study coauthor and a senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, an education research group based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Not Skimming Best Students
Gill said the research led to four conclusions.

* Charter schools are not “skimming the cream” of students, as some critics have worried. Students’ academic achievement was comparable to that of students at traditional public schools. Furthermore, demographics and racial/ethnic compositions also were comparable between the charter schools and the public schools the students had left.

* Test scores did not significantly differ between charter and public middle schools and high schools. “One thing we learned, though, was that the jury is still out on charter elementary schools,” Gill said. The academic achievement for kindergartners, in particular, was difficult to determine because no data from the previous year is available, so researchers cannot compare the trajectory as they would for other grades, he explained.

* Traditional public schools are unharmed by charter growth. The research showed no effect, either positive or negative, on the academic achievement of nearby public school students’ performance as charter schools expanded into their districts.

* Greater percentages of charter school students graduate from high school and attend college than those in traditional public schools.....

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