Charter School Achievement Studies

Abstract

A study on charter school performance always makes for a good news story. Unfortunately, like many press reports on medicine and other scientific issues, stories about student achievement in charter schools are premature and often misleading. Americans are just now starting to ask tough questions about the effectiveness of particular schools and to keep and analyze the hard data needed. Studies done to date are perfectly good as rough early efforts to answer a very hard question. But they don’t have the scientific or policy significance the press, and sometimes their authors, claim they do. As part of our work for the National Charter School Research Program, we analyzed every study published since 2000 on the link between students’ attending charter schools and academic achievement. We identified only 41 studies focusing on test scores, of which we were able to obtain copies of 40. None report on longer-term results like persistence in school success at the next level of education, graduation rates, or college attendance. Though 40 states and the District of Columbia have charter laws, the available research covers schools in only 13 states, with 5 studies on California, 4 on Texas, and 3 on Florida. Because state laws are so different, and charter schools differ from state to state in mission, funding, size, grade-level coverage, and independence from regulations and teacher contracts, the absence of evidence from many states makes it impossible to make definitive statements about charter schools in general.