RALEIGH – There are some additional studies out regarding the academic benefits of charter schools in North Carolina. The subject was already complicated – and the new research, while adding useful insights, also adds more layers of complexity.
The effectiveness of charter schools in boosting student achievement is a timely issue given that Mecklenburg, Wake, and other growing communities are facing staggering price tags for housing future students. Eliminating North Carolina’s statewide cap of 100 charter schools is an obvious means of alleviating that burden without tax hikes, since students who transfer from a district-run public school to a chartered public school take operating but not capital funding with them.
But, say some sticks-in-the-mud, we can’t let fiscal goals trump educational ones. If students will get a better education in the district-run schools, opening up charter-school options will harm those who transfer. Notice that the fact that parents would voluntarily choose to transfer these kids to the charter is not taken as an indicator of potential benefit. Most existing charters have more families aching to get into them than they have space available. To charter-school skeptics, this is evidence that, to be blunt, parents don’t have enough information to make good decisions. School officials know better.
In fairness, charter-school skeptics have other ammunition. They cite a study by Duke University’s Helen Ladd and the University of Connecticut’s Robert Bifulco that purported to prove, using individual-level data, that on average North Carolina students would have been better off staying in district-run schools rather than transferring to charters. I don’t know how many of the skeptics have seen a subsequent, careful examination of Ladd and Bifulco’s work by Craig Newmark of N.C. State University. Newmark concluded in part that they had made assumptions unfavorable to charter effectiveness, and that by other measures their own data showed smaller differences in performance or even superior performance by North Carolina charter schools.
So, here comes two new studies. One, by Jay Greene and two colleagues at the University of Arkansas, is advertised as the first true national “apples-to-apples” comparison of charter schools and district-run schools serving similar student populations. They found that charter schools did, indeed, boost student performance, with the most dramatic improvements posted by charter schools in Florida and Texas. However, as has been true in some previous studies by Greene and others, North Carolina’s charter schools did not fare as well. The apples-to-apples comparison did show NC charters to outperform the district-run schools, but the gap was not large enough to meet a test of statistical significance.
On the other hand, a paper published in the latest edition of the magazine EducationNext looked at a different but important question: whether the existence of North Carolina charter schools put pressure on district-run schools to compete through improving their own performance. The answer – according to coauthors George Holmes from UNC-Chapel Hill, Jeff DeSimone from the University of South Florida, and Nicholas Rupp from East Carolina – is yes. Their “comparisons provide consistent evidence that charter-school competition raises the performance composite of traditional public schools” in North Carolina. The trio placed the magnitude of the gain in striking terms:
In 2002 the North Carolina governor’s office proposed a $26 million increase in the state budget to reduce average class size by roughly 1.8 students. Although the relationship between changes in the student-teacher ratio and changes in school performance is not statistically significant, the size of the relationship suggests that the governor’s plan would increase scores by roughly 0.36 percentage points. However, our data indicate that opening a charter school would increase public-school test scores by one full point (1.0). Expanding the number of charter schools therefore seems like a promising, and far more cost-effective, alternative to lowering class size.
I think a fair reading of the academic evidence so far is as follows. At worst, the performance of North Carolina charter-school students is not much different from how comparable students perform in our district-run schools – in part because the increased competition helps to improve the district schools. At best, charter schools actually do a better job than district schools, as evidenced by the fact that demand for charter-school slots currently exceeds supply. Some output measures suggest this, too. In 2004-05, according to the League of Charter Schools, the composite score of regular charter schools on state end-of-grade tests was equivalent to the statewide average for district-run schools, even though the charters had a higher percentage of at-risk students.
The good news from the standpoint of seeking economical ways to house new students is that either conclusion will suffice. To help accommodate growing enrollments, North Carolina’s statewide cap on charter schools needs to disappear – now.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.