With Betsy DeVos now leading the Department of Education, American parents and students will likely have access before long to a federally sponsored school-choice program. That's great news, but the Trump administration's education policymakers shouldn't ignore the growing charter-school movement, which has dramatically improved access to high-quality education for many students whom the traditional public school system has left behind.
We should work to make traditional public schools as good as they can possibly be, but where layers of rules and regulations have made reform difficult, charters offer the chance of a clean slate. As taxpayer-funded public schools, charters are open to all students and subject to the same accountability systems as traditional public schools. What makes charters different is their freedom from the unnecessary, outdated and counterproductive work rules vigorously defended by the teachers' unions.
“Charters succeed using various strategies. The most successful schools adopt a mix of high expectations, more instructional time and improved teacher effectiveness. This is hardly revolutionary.”
Charters aren't perfect; quality varies both within and across localities. Overall, suburban students do no better in charters than in local public schools and, often, they do worse, according to research by MIT economists Joshua Angrist, Parag Pathak and University of California, Berkeley, economist Christopher Walters. But students in many cities do better, on average, when they attend charters, according to research by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes. Attending a charter school can be a difference-maker for kids in cities such as Boston, New Orleans, and Newark. Those who say that charters don't work tend to lump the urban and suburban schools together, treating the heterogeneous charter sector as if it were a homogenous phenomenon. That's a mistake.
Charters are now succeeding on a large scale. Student achievement has improved dramatically in New Orleans, for example, since it became essentially an all-charter district. Schools in the popular Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) continue to produce staggering academic results. They now enroll 80,000 students in 200 schools around the country. If it were its own school district, KIPP would be the 41st-largest in the United States, just behind Milwaukee. Recent research by education professor Sarah Cohodes of Teachers College Columbia University, MIT economist Elizabeth Setren, and UC Berekley's Walters, finds that charters aren't getting worse as they increase their market share; if anything, they may be improving. Perhaps the day will come when innovation in the charter sector produces diminishing returns. That hasn't happened yet.
Charters succeed using various strategies. The most successful schools adopt a mix of high expectations, more instructional time and improved teacher effectiveness. This is hardly revolutionary. Recent research by Harvard University economist Roland Fryer shows that these practices yield similar positive results when applied in public schools. Resistance to reform is strong within traditional school systems, however, where teachers' unions and entrenched education bureaucracies wield formidable political influence. The charter sector's innovations, which prioritize the education of children, often run counter to the interests of the adults running most public school districts.
Many critics argue that charters do not adequately serve students with disabilities, often counseling them to return to public school. The evidence doesn't support these claims. My analysis of student-enrollment and classification patterns in both New York and Denver shows that a student with a disability is actually less likely to leave a charter than a traditional public school. In fact, attending a charter school can affect whether a child even needs special-education services. In a newly published paper, my coauthors and I found that students attending Denver charters were less likely than kids in traditional district schools to be placed into special education in the early elementary grades. Another recent study found that elementary-age students randomly offered a spot in a Boston charter school were less likely to be newly classified into special education in kindergarten than students randomly denied a seat in a charter.
Many regular-enrollment students in charters would have been placed into special education had they gone to a traditional public school. Charters are serving these kids; they just don't classify them as disabled. The most plausible explanation for why: students attending charters do better academically than they would have done otherwise, thus eliminating the need for extra services.
No, charter schools aren't a silver bullet, but they have helped hundreds of thousands of kids escape lousy schools. The Trump administration should heed the findings of empirical research and push states to make it easier for charters to open, innovate, and expand.
This piece originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News, adapted from City Journal Online
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Marcus Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an associate professor at Boston University
This piece originally appeared in Dallas Morning News