Charter Schools Bridge the Gap

In case Americans needed reminding that thousands of traditional schools in some of America’s largest cities are not serving their students, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recently published a report comparing student scores from six urban areas on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and writing tests with the national averages for these tests.¹ The report showed that students from traditional schools in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and New York are performing significantly lower than the national average. These results should not shock those familiar with traditional education. We have known since the release of 1983’s A Nation at Risk, if not before, that students in America’s urban traditional schools often are not as well prepared as their peers in more affluent areas. Scoring poorly on tests of English and math proficiency, many of these urban children will end up contributing to their city’s dropout rates once they reach high school—or worse, they will contribute to the crime, poverty, and unemployment rates. The system of traditional education in these areas has proved to be insufficient, and penetrating reform is long overdue.

As one would expect, a large majority of the students in this NCES report are from poor or minority families. At least 67 percent of the student population in each of the reviewed school systems qualifies for the federal free and reduced-priced lunch program—though the percentage in some of these cities is considerably more than 67 percent: in Chicago, 89 percent of 4th graders qualify and 84 percent of 8th graders qualify; and, in Washington, DC, 78 percent of 4th graders qualify. At least 85 percent of the students in each of the six school systems in the NCES study were minorities, with higher percentages in some of the cities.

Sadly, these areas have a racial achievement gap of cosmic proportions, and they are not alone. Newspapers in Oregon and Minnesota, to name two, testify that their state residents are also aware of this ever-growing national problem. A recent editorial in The Oregonian said that assessments such as the NAEP or standards set under the No Child Left Behind law are effectively making people aware that ethnic achievement gaps are not the figment of a conservative imagination. “The one-third of Oregon schools that did not meet the federal standards are not ‘failing’ schools in the common definition of a shattered school utterly failing to prepare students. Instead, these schools are still troubled by a stubborn achievement gap between rich and poor children, and between whites and ethnic minority students,” the editorial says.² In another recent story, it was reported that Minnesota has the largest racial achievement gap among 19 states with a high school exit exam studied by the Center on Education Policy.³ The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that it was the “’usual suspects’ that contributed to that large gap” including “concentrations of poverty, poor access to great schools, and trouble recruiting and keeping good teachers in urban schools.” The NCES study of the six urban centers was just scratching the surface of a nationwide racial achievement gap phenomenon.

Nevertheless, there is hope for areas plagued by this stubborn performance gap. Charter schools and other schools of choice are giving students access to a quality education, and a new study from the Manhattan Institute shows that charter schools are bridging the achievement gap.⁴ Researchers found that, when compared to similar student populations, charter school students outperform their peers in traditional traditional schools. What makes this report an especially strong argument for charter schools is that the students in the schools that were compared came from the same or similar socioeconomic levels and reside in the same areas (hence, Apples to Apples, the title of the study). The researchers intentionally designed their study in this way to quell objectors who would claim that charter schools are “creaming” traditional schools (taking the highest-performing students away from their traditional school), which is why they outperform traditional schools.

Researchers studied charter schools and their comparable traditional schools in 11 states, with students in Florida and Texas showing the most impressive improvements. Students in Florida showed a 6-percentile point increase in both the SAT-9 math assessment and the FCAT reading test. In Texas, charter students showed a 7-percentile point gain on the TAAS math test and an 8-percentile point gain on the TAAS reading test. Further, the study found that, nationally, charter school students outperformed their traditional school peers in both math (raising by 3 percentile points the achievement level of a student at the 50th percentile) and reading (2 percentile points).

In establishing a list of schools to compare, the Manhattan Institute researchers discovered that districts were adopting a curious bias when approving charters: charter school opponents within districts will tend to approve those charters that serve students especially expensive or cumbersome for the traditional schools to serve, such as special education students or students that are disruptive in the classroom. “This tends to discourage the creation of charter schools that might effectively compete with regular traditional schools for students who are easier to education, since school boards have no incentive to approve of the creation of such schools and every incentive to resist them,” the study says. Thus, there are many charter schools that serve specific student populations and have no comparable traditional traditional school. “By comparing ‘untargeted’ charter schools serving the general population to their closest neighboring regular traditional schools, we can draw a fair comparison and get an accurate picture of how well charter schools are performing,” researchers said. This approval strategy practiced by charter opponents makes Apples to Apples all the more valuable to those who want to see students succeed, no matter what style of system educates them.

The trend found in the Manhattan Institute study is supported by a study from the Georgia Department of Education released in 2001. This report reviewed how state charter schools were comparing to traditional schools—finding results similar to Apples to Apples. “Overall, charter schools had higher percentages of students meeting or exceeding the standard on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT), the Middle Grades Writing Assessment (MGWA), and the Georgia High School Graduation Test (GHSGT) than their comparison schools in all years for which data were available,” this study said.⁵ This study, too, compared similar student populations: “Achievement on the [tests] was analyzed for charter schools and a comparison group of non-charter schools that had demographics (free and reduced lunch and race/ethnicity) similar to the charter schools.” Charter school opponents should be worried because conversion schools fared particularly well in this study; this means that Georgia traditional schools now under new management outperformed students at traditional schools. It would make sense, then, for authorizers opposed to charter schools to reject charters that would serve students typically served by local traditional schools—supporting the idea suggested in Apples to Apples.

What does this mean? First, when a student struggles in their traditional traditional school, areas providing them school choice options offer hope. Each of the urban areas in the NCES study—along with Oregon and Minnesota—have state laws allowing the creation of charter schools. Since some schools can educate disadvantaged students better than others, providing quality choices to parents will effectively ensure that all students get a good education, even those considered by traditional school officials to be difficult to educate. The existing monopoly of traditional traditional schools is inadequate to meet the needs of many students, and more needs to be done by state legislators to promote the success of charter schools and other forms of parental choice.

Sources:

¹National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Trial Urban District Assessment: Reading 2002 and Writing 2002, July 22, 2003.
²Editorial, “The Children Left Behind: The Federal Education Plan is Far From Perfect, But It is Motivating Schools to Close the Achievement Gap,” The Oregonian, August 12, 2003, p. B08.
³John Welbes, “Achievement gaps between state’s white and black students largest in nation,” The St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 13, 2003.
⁴Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., Greg Forster, Ph.D., and Marcus A. Winters, Apples to Apples: An Evaluation of Charter Schools Serving General Student Populations, The Manhattan Institute, July 2003.
⁵Georgia Department of Education, Charter Schools Evaluation, November 2001, available at http://www.doe.k12.ga.us/_documents/schools/charterschools/evaluation_01.pdf.

Submitted by Jonathan Butcher, research assistant in domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. His specific areas of study are education reform and family policy. An OpEd he wrote with Senior Policy Analyst Krista Kafer was recently published by FoxNews.com: "Head Start Needs Reform, Not More Money," FoxNews.com, July 14, 2003. Jonathan can be reached at 202.608.6073 or Jonathan.Butcher@Heritage.org.