Charter Schools’ Virtuous Improvement Cycle Betters K-12 System

Virtuous Cycle Reduces Inequality, Promotes Equal Opportunity—

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By Bruno V. Manno, Contributor ??????????????????????????????????Oct 10, 2024,09:43am EDT?

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“Charter school laws have been arguably the most influential school reform efforts of the past several decades,”?write?economists?Douglas Harris?and?Feng Chen.

Since the first law creating these independent public schools of choice was passed in 1991, we’ve learned many lessons about their impact on students, the traditional K-12 system, and the communities where they exist. Here are three of those lessons:

1. Charter schools reduce academic inequality by closing student achievement gaps.

2. Charter schools raise the overall quality of public schools.

3. Creating more charter schools will improve the quality of K-12 public schools and reduce inequality in America.

This is what I call the virtuous improvement cycle of charter schools.

Over the last 18 months, four national and two state reports on charter schools were released, providing more evidence of a dynamic, self-improvement cycle.

What follows overviews the current charter school landscape; summarizes the national and state reports; and suggests how charter schools build social capital and provide young people with a foundation for pursuing opportunity.

Today’s Charter School Landscape

Since 1991, 46 charter laws have created 8,000 schools and campuses that enroll 3.7 million students, around 7.5% of all public school students. Charter school enrollment is increasing while traditional district school enrollment is increasing.?For example,?over the five years from 2019-2020 to 2023-2024, charter enrollment grew by around 393,000 (+12%) students, while district enrollment decreased by around 1,750,000 students (-4%). Around six out of 10 (58%) schools are in urban areas, with the others in suburbs (25%), rural areas (11%), or smaller towns (6%).

These schools employ around 251,000 teachers, who are younger and more racially and ethnically?diverse?than traditional district school teachers. Additionally, charter schools consistently enroll more students of color and students from low-income families than traditional district schools. Currently, seven out of 10 (71%) are students of color compared to around half (54%) of district students, with six out of 10 students receiving free and reduced lunch compared to half in district schools. Hispanic students?are?the fastest-growing student group in America’s charter schools.

Charter School Effects: National Studies

The?first?2023 report was from the Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes. It found that the typical charter student made gains in reading and math test scores greater than the typical district student. Charters added 6 days of learning in math and 16 days in reading. Charter management organizations operating multiple schools were especially effective, regularly “returning more positive, and often gap-busting, results,” the report says.

The second 2023?report?was from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Bureau of Economic Research. It summarized thirty years of evidence for lottery charter schools—schools where more students apply than can be accepted, requiring lotteries to determine who can enroll. This?gold standard?scientific research concludes, “Existing evidence shows that charter schools can improve academic achievement and longer-term outcomes like four-year college enrollment, particularly among lower performing students, non-white students, low-income students, and students with disabilities.”

The third 2023 report was from the Tulane University researchers quoted above and published in the?Journal of Public Economics. It examined school district data from 1995 to 2016, analyzing the effects of charter schools on standardized tests and graduation rates, including the impact on students attending nearby public schools.

It found that districts growing charter schools’ market share by 10% increased math and reading scores and high school graduation rates for all students, not just one particular student group. This is partly the result of the competitive effects of charter schools, including replacing underperforming traditional district schools with better-performing charter schools.

The 2024 report is?Searching for the Tipping Point:?Scaling Up Public School Choice Spurs Citywide Gains?from the Progressive Policy Institute. (Disclosure: I am a senior advisor at PPI. My colleague Tressa Pankovits is the author of the report. I was not involved in any of the project research.)

This first-of-its-kind analysis examines student math and reading test scores between 2010-2011 and 2022-2023 in grades three to eight in 10 school districts. These districts have more than half of their students eligible for free and reduced lunch; enroll more than 15,000 students; and have at least one-third of their students attending brick-and-mortar charter or charter-like schools.

The analysis shows that low-income students in both public charter schools and traditional district schools across those cities are catching up to statewide student performance levels, typically closing the achievement gap by between 25% to 40%. This suggests that a sustained commitment to creating public charter schools where at least a third of the district students are enrolled in these schools contributes to improved academic outcomes for all students.

The report concludes, “While one-third is not a guaranteed tipping point, it is true that in every case where charter schools reached or exceeded that scale, academic growth rose across the entire city for all of a city’s low-income students. Students in low-income urban communities start catching up with the performance levels of all students statewide, regardless of the type of school they attend.”

This analysis cannot determine if charter schools are the only cause of this improvement. For example, state and district policies on accountability or other issues may interact with charter policy to create an environment that produces this result.

Charter School Effects: State Studies

One state report published in 2024 was on?Florida?charter schools. It found strong evidence that charter schools in 12 large and diverse districts improved reading scores (though not math scores) and lowered absenteeism rates of students in traditional district public schools.

The other 2024?analysis?was of Massachusetts charter schools. This was another gold-standard lottery study that found urban charter schools improved student college preparation, enrollment, and graduation. Nonurban charter schools did raise college enrollment and graduation, though they also reduced state test scores and Advanced Placement enrollment. The report concluded, “Our results suggest that there is more than one path to a college degree and that test score impacts may not predict college outcomes.”

All six of these analyses suggest that the chartering model based on parent (and teacher) choice, school autonomy, and accountability for results creates a dynamic, virtuous cycle that has a positive effect on every student and school in a district.

Building Social Capital

Charter schools also build what the sociologist James Coleman called?social capital, which he defined “…as a resource for action [that includes] obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms.” A charter school’s social capital comes from the relationships that exist among people: the children who attend it, the educators who staff it, the parents and other community members who support it. A charter school lacking social capital is not likely to be much of a productive learning environment or community asset.

Charters create new forms of association. While some charters are neighborhood schools in the old-fashioned sense, others transcend particular neighborhoods or geographic places. They may be organized by curricular philosophies like Montessori or classical education or by place-based geographic approaches like charters located in parent workplaces. There are also networks of charter schools or charter management organizations that cross district and state boundaries and are organized around a common mission and instructional design.

Charter schools display elements that sociologist Robert Nisbet thought essential to community association, including a high degree of personal intimacy, social cohesion, and moral commitment. As he wrote in?The Quest for Community, “Community is the product of people working together on problems, of autonomous and collective fulfillment or internal objectives, and of the experience of living under codes of authority which have been set in large degrees by the persons involved.” This working together is a form of civic participation and renewal.

Pathways To Opportunity

Not every charter school has lived up to its promise or been a source of community civic renewal. Many have been closed for not serving their students, families, or communities. However, there is ample evidence that the charter model of parent (and educator) choice, school autonomy, and accountability for results produces academic, competitive, and social results that lay the foundation for a young person’s pursuit of opportunity.

In doing so, successful charter schools reduce inequality and promote equal opportunity for students in both charter and district schools. In that sense, chartering creates a self-improving system of public education. It is a?system change?because it creates an opening for new school innovations that create incentives for the district sector to change. The result is a dynamic, virtuous cycle for a self-improving system.

This virtuous cycle helps young people in charter and district schools develop knowledge, relationships, and an identity. These are the building blocks for creating a self-directed life and what the economist Deirdre McCloskey?calls?“a new liberty of permission” that allows young people to pursue opportunity and human flourishing.

These studies should motivate policymakers and local community members to create more high-quality independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.

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Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute, leads its Pathways to Opportunity What Works Lab, and is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy.

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