SwampFox

Powerful research that independent charter schools significantly out perform traditional schools

Submitted by: John Warner on Jun 27, 2009 at 2:47 pm Tagged with: Academia, K-12 education Source: Swamp Fox

Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools

The school choice debate usually focuses on the choices parents have, and significantly understates how much school choice empowers the best and brightest teachers. This study by the Boston Foundation controlled for the motivation of parents and demonstrates the powerful impact allowing teachers to own both the problem and the solution can have. This is a very interesting study for several reasons.

1) The authors are hardly opponents of public education.

2) They accounted for the most common criticism that charter schools out perform traditional schools primarily because charter schools draw from the most motivated parents. Students entered a lottery to enroll in charter schools, so parents were all motivated to try to enroll their students in charter schools. This study compared the subsequent performance of students who were selected in the lotteries to those students who weren't selected in lotteries. Even controlling for the motivation of their parents, the study found that charter schools out perform traditional schools.

3) The most interesting aspect is the comparison of charter schools and what in Boston are known as pilot schools, which have similar flexibility as charter schools buy are still governed by the local school district. The study found little improvement for pilot schools over traditional schools, but significant improvement for charter schools over traditional schools. Governance matters a lot in the performance of schools, or anything else for that matter. In the aggregate, teachers who own the solution as well as the problem will out perform teachers who work in a bureaucratic system.

All of us who have worked in large corporations and entrepreneurial companies completely understand that dynamic. Yet some critics of school choice say, "Just empower teachers in the current system." [Comment by Furman education professor Paul Thomas to an editorial I wrote in the Greenville News last week: Our state must plan for life after this economic storm] Innovation and entrepreneurship does not work that way. You can' t tell people inside large companies to "just be more entrepreneurial" any more than you can teachers inside the existing system of public education "just be more entrepreneurial." You can't put new wine in an old wine skin.

If the school district governs the innovative school, the innovative school's performance likely will be compromised, as this study found. Magnet schools and other weak forms of choice are not substitutes for charter schools that are truly free of the influence of the local school district. In South Carolina, charter schools outside of school districts are at a serious funding disadvantage relative to charter schools inside districts, yet they are precisely the schools that are likely to perform the best. If we really want to deal with a funding issue that will make a difference in public education, it is making money at all levels follow the child to empower the most creative teachers to develop innovative education alternatives for students not well served. That will make a substantial difference in public education in South Carolina.

Authors
Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University
Josh Angrist, MIT and National Bureau of Economic Research
Sarah Cohodes, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Susan Dynarski, University of Michigan School of Education and Ford School of Public Policy
and National Bureau of Economic Research
Jon Fullerton, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Thomas Kane, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Parag Pathak, MIT and National Bureau of Economic Research

Summary of Findings
Whether using the randomized lotteries or statistical controls for measured background characteristics, we generally find large positive effects for Charter Schools, at both the middle school and high school levels. For each year of attendance in middle school, we estimate that Charter Schools raise student achievement .09 to .17 standard deviations in English Language Arts and .18 to .54 standard deviations in math relative to those attending traditional schools in the Boston Public Schools. The estimated impact on math achievement for Charter middle schools is extraordinarily large. Increasing performance by .5 standard deviations is the same as moving from the 50th to the 69th percentile in student performance. This is roughly half the size of the blackwhite achievement gap. In high school, the estimated gains are somewhat smaller than in middle school: .16 to .19 standard deviations in English Language Arts; .16 to .19 in mathematics; .2 to .28 in writing topic development; and .13 to .17 in writing composition with the lottery-based results. The estimated impacts of middle schools and high school Charters are similar in both the “observational” and “lottery-based” results.

Unfortunately, the results for Pilot Schools are more ambiguous and deserve further study. In the elementary grades, the estimated impact of Pilots was positive in English language arts (.09), but not statistically different from zero in mathematics. In the middle school grades, the observational results suggest that Pilot School students may actually lose ground relative to traditional public school students, with point estimates of -.05 standard deviations per year in English Language Arts and -.07 in math. However, our lottery-based results suggest that the performance of Pilot School students is not statistically distinguishable from zero. At the high school level, Pilot impacts are somewhat more encouraging but still ambiguous. The estimates based on statistical controls are positive and generally similar in magnitude to those of Charter Schools. However, the estimated impacts of Pilot high schools using the lotteries are not statistically significantly different from zero.