RALEIGH — As the 2004 election season in North Carolina gets underway, candidates for various offices are likely to devote a substantial part of their campaign messages to the issue of education.
Rather than delving deeply into education-reform issues here, let me just make an initial observation, or perhaps one might call it a warning. Beware of formulations about education from politicians that start with something like, “Everyone knows that. . .” This is usually a tip-off that someone is about to assert a “known fact” about a complex topic without bothering to cite a source or explain in detail the theory behind the assertion. In reality, while there are some common areas of agreement among education researchers, a great deal remains controversial.
Consider the topic of charter schools. I happen to know that we are probably going to hear a lot of political rhetoric about charter schools in the coming months. Supporters of the state’s original charter-school legislation will note the schools’ obvious popularity among parents, take credit for expanding parental choice, and press for expansion of the program. Opponents will cite unimpressive test-score averages for many charters, complaints from local school systems about the tax money they say they’re losing to charters, and press for no more and perhaps somewhat fewer charters.
The debate reflects fundamental disagreements about how the market for education works (or whether there is one in the first place). It reflects struggles over power and control. It reflects different ways of thinking about what marks a successful school, and how to measure student achievement. For example, charter schools that don’t use the state’s standard course of study, but must nevertheless give the state’s standardized tests aligned with the course of study, properly complain that their performance is not accurately measured by the resulting scores.
These fundamental differences of opinion cannot be settled by a single piece of “proof” offered up by one side or the other. I strongly favor charter schools, indeed their proliferation, but I’m not going to argue that there is a conclusive body of evidence that disproves every possible criticism of every charter school.
There is promising evidence of success. Past research by the North Carolina Education Alliance, a special project of the John Locke Foundation, found that if North Carolina charter schools with at least three years of operation under their belts (those past the start-up stage, in other words) were treated as if they formed a single school district, its performance would be close to the state average for school districts — but its per-pupil cost would be significantly below average. In other words, it could be argued, charter schools in North Carolina seem to be more cost-effective than district-run public schools are.
Another promising research finding came in a paper published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Scholars George Holmes, Jeff DeSimone and Nicolas Rupp studied North Carolina’s charter schools and tried to measure their effect on student achievement trends in the state. They used end-of-year test scores for grades three through eight to explore whether the competition provided by charter schools had any effect on the test scores in public schools run by school districts.
They observed that 90 percent of North Carolina’s district-run public schools were within 13 miles of a charter school. Examining the test scores, they found that charter school competition raised the composite test scores in district schools, even though the students leaving district schools for the charters tended to have above-average test scores. “The gain was relatively large, roughly two to five times greater than the gain from decreasing the student-faculty ratio by 1,” wrote NBER’s Linda Gorman in a recent summary of the paper. Specifically, the model showed that the introduction of charter school competition in North Carolina caused an approximate one percent increase in the average scale score, which constitutes about one quarter of the average yearly growth.
They put the findings in context this way: Gov. Mike Easley “proposed increasing achievement by reducing average class size by 1.8 students at a cost of $26 million in 2002. The data suggest that this would produce just one-third of the test score increase created by opening a neighboring charter school, a move that would not require any additional spending.”
In fairness, I have to point out that other independent work done on North Carolina charter-school performance isn’t as promising. Dr. Jay Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute and an advocate of market-based education reform, published a study last year that offered evidence of statistically significant benefits from charter schools in most of the states he studied. But his findings in North Carolina “were the weakest of the five states for which we report separate results.” Year-to-year math score gains in NC charters were 0.02 standard deviations higher than those of regular public schools, equal to a 1 percentile point gain for a student starting at the 50th percentile, and reading score gains were 0.01 standard deviations higher, equal to less than a 1 percentile point gain. Neither of these findings was statistically significant, he wrote, “so we cannot be confident that untargeted charter schools in North Carolina had any effect on test scores.”
Later this year, my JLF colleagues will be publishing some new research on charter-school finances and performance. Others, including critics, are expected to do so, as well. The debate about charter schools and test scores will continue among researchers and reformers — and less responsibly, among politicians.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.