RALEIGH – The debate over parental choice in North Carolina education has only just begun. With regard to the current controversy, charter schools, it will probably be worthwhile to look outside the state for the context and complexities of the issue that are unavailable in local media coverage.
First, if you want to get a sense of what a larger, more mature market for chartered public schools might look like, a good place to start is Arizona. The Barry Goldwater Institute in Phoenix has been tracking the performance of students in Arizona’s charter-school sector, the largest in the United States. Their studies demonstrate significant benefits for students. Specifically, charter school students on average start below their peers in educational attainment but make larger annual gains in test scores.
Other research has demonstrated the early promise of charter schools. Last year, Dr. Jay Greene and two colleagues at the Manhattan Institute examined charter schools in 11 states, including North Carolina. Their task was to account for at least some of the obvious differences between the populations of district-run and charter schools, differences that often confound analysts attempting to separate out the possible effects of charter schools from other factors pulling test-score averages up or down.
“This is the first national empirical study of charter schools that compares apples to apples — that is, test scores at charter schools and regular public schools serving similar student populations,” they wrote. “By comparing ‘untargeted’ charter schools serving the general population to their closest neighboring regular public schools, we can draw a fair comparison and get an accurate picture of how well charter schools are performing.”
The results were, on balance, positive but not earth-shattering. In one year, charter students outperformed nearby regular public schools by 0.08 standard deviations in math, equivalent to a benefit of 3 percentile points for a student starting at the 50th percentile, and by 0.04 standard deviations in reading, equal to a benefit of 2 percentile points. Breaking out the five states with enough data points for separate analysis, Greene and his colleagues found the strongest benefits in Florida and Texas. The weakest charter-school effect was in North Carolina, actually, where the results were tiny and statistically insignificant.
But one other study specific to North Carolina offered a more promising take on the state’s charter-school movement. Researchers at the highly respected National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts looked at the issue in a different way. Does the presence of a charter school nearby put enough competitive pressure on district-run schools to help improve their performance? The answer, according to the NBER, appears to be yes. “The authors find 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,” a summary of the report states. The gain was relatively large, roughly two to five times greater than the gain from decreasing the student-faculty ratio by 1. “For comparison, the authors point out that [Gov. Mike Easley] proposed increasing achievement by reducing average class size by 1.8 students at a cost of $26 million in 2002,” the summary continues. “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.”
I’m not pretending to suggest that this issue is settled. The debate is only in its initial stages, something to remember when critics of charter schools making sweeping and dismissive generalizations of their own.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
P.s. If you’d like to delve further into the debate about charter schools and parental choice in North Carolina, it is highly likely that we will be bringing the discussion to a community near you in the coming weeks. JLF’s North Carolina Education Alliance has begun its Fall 2004 tour of cities across the state, and the theme is charter schools – particularly the implications of two new critical studies of charters, one by a teacher union and the other, specific to North Carolina charter schools, co-authored by a professor at Duke. There are presentations in Charlotte and Raleigh on the subject next week, by two well-known experts from Washington. There will be subsequent events in many other communities, so check the NC Education Alliance’s Events section to locate one near you.