On Average, Charter Schools Are About Average

Dana Goldstein’s final column for The American Prospect looks at some examples of murky evidence in the education policy realm. The point is well-taken, but I think in one specific example she uses—charter schools—the policy solution is pretty clear:

It’s difficult to obtain unimpeachable statistical data on how to improve life outcomes for children. But as best we can tell, the average charter school performs about the same as the average public school. Some charter schools, however, are much better than average.

Andrew Coulson tells us that Cato is putting together an event on replicating high-quality schools:

In response to Ryan McNeely’s excellent post yesterday on the success of KIPP schools (and I recommend that you read the comments where a lot of methodological issues get explored), Kevin Drum offers pessimism about the scale on which the model can be made to work:

Charter schools are publicly funded but operate outside the regulatory framework and collective bargaining agreements characteristic of traditional public schools. In return for this freedom, charter schools are subject to heightened accountability. This paper estimates the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data from Boston, where charter schools enroll a growing share of students. We also evaluate an alternative to the charter model, Boston's pilot schools.

By Ryan McNeely

Interesting paper from Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M. Dynarski, Thomas J. Kane, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters titled “Who Benefits from KIPP” that’s able to look in a rigorous way at whether the high performance of KIPP students relative to demographically similar non-KIPP students is merely the result of some kind of selection effect. They confirm earlier studies that indicate that it is not, and KIPP provides genuine value-added beyond what’s typical of American schools: