NEPC Resources on Charter Schools
NEPC Review: Still a Good Investment: Charter School Productivity in Nine Cities (University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, November 2023)
This report claims that charter schools get better results on standardized tests even as they receive less in revenues, making them more cost-effective. To support this claim, the report combines its own database of school revenues with results from another think tank that compares charter school students’ academic growth with matched students in public schools. There is substantial reason to question both the fiscal and academic outcome comparisons, but the report makes an additional critical error: When transforming academic outcomes into a common scale, it conflates test scores with academic “growth,” rendering its outcome measure invalid. It then compounds this error by using a simplistic “return on investment” measure that eschews the complexity found in serious research on education cost modeling. The report, consequently, is yet another methodologically flawed document that should be ignored by policymakers and stakeholders.
Suggested Citation: Weber, M. (2023). NEPC review: Still a good investment: Charter school productivity in nine cities. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from: http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/charter-productivity
NEPC Review: From Surviving to Thriving: K-12 Choice and Opportunity for Rural Texas Students and Teachers (The Heritage Foundation, August 2023)
A Heritage Foundation report claims increased competition has improved academic achievement in Arizona’s rural public schools and that similar policies will be good for rural Texas. However, this report overstates the similarities between Arizona and Texas, ignores relevant research literature, and presents simplistic and inaccurate analyses to support its claims. By addressing a narrow set of possible benefits of school choice, it also overlooks issues related to fiscal impacts for district schools, segregation, and exclusionary practices for students who require specialized services in schools. The report is an exercise in advocacy for expanding school choice policies, and its usefulness as a guide for policy and practice is minimal.
Suggested Citation: Potterton, A.U., Rogers, A., & Powers, J.M. (2023). NEPC review: From surviving to thriving: K-12 choice and opportunity for rural Texas students and teachers. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/rural-choice
Why What Looked Like Good News for Charter Schools Actually Wasn’t
NEPC Review: As a Matter of Fact: National Charter School Study III 2023 (Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), June 2023)
A CREDO report compares charter school students’ learning in reading and math to students in traditional public schools. The report should be approached with caution by policymakers given the nonexperimental design that renders it unable to fully account for the factors that drive families to choose charter schools. In addition, the report presents its findings using an unconventional metric that makes it difficult to understand the policy implications, potentially misleading policymakers. The magnitude of the main findings fails to meet the minimum threshold experts consider to be a meaningful educational intervention.
Suggested Citation: Ferrare, J.J. (2023). NEPC review: As a matter of fact: National charter school study III 2023. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http:// nepc.colorado.edu/review/charter-study
School Choice for Teachers
NEPC Review: Think Again: Do Charter Schools Drain Resources From Traditional Public Schools? (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, March 2023)
A Fordham report examines whether charter schools impact traditional public schools' finances and efficiency. The report finds mixed impacts on district finances, but suggests that traditional public schools improve efficiency over time when faced with charter competition. However, the report's claims and policy recommendations are untested empirically and unwarranted based on research. It fails to consider other possible explanations for higher expenditures in a charter environment, and downplays the negative impact of public school closures resulting from competition. While the report identifies relevant studies, its unsupported claims and recommendations limit its usefulness to policymakers.
Suggested Citation: Jabbar, H. (2023). NEPC review: Think again: Do charter schools drain resources from traditional public schools? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/think-again
Eight Ways to Increase Charter School Equity
ICYMI: NEPC’s Top Newsletters of 2022
NEPC Review: Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education (Heritage Foundation, November 2022)
A Heritage Foundation report compares the amount of “wokeness” terminology in parent/student handbooks in charter schools with the level of charter school regulation in their states, and concludes that while charters represent a safe space away from “woke indoctrination” in public schools, further deregulation and less bureaucracy will allow that sector to truly respond to parent desires to avoid “leftist” curriculum. While apparently intended to tap into current turmoil, the report has at least five significant weaknesses. It assumes that parent/student handbooks are good proxies for curriculum; it completely ignores the diversity of parents and relevant research about what large proportions of parents actually want; it conflates correlation with causation; it relies on undefined conceptions of what constitutes “wokeness;” and it possibly uses cherry-picked data and methods that suit ideological bias. These shortcomings render the report useless for understanding or developing policy.
NEPC Review: For-Profit Charter Schools: An Evaluation of Their Spending and Outcomes (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, September 2022)
A Thomas B. Fordham Institute report examines academic outcomes in Ohio’s nonprofit and for-profit charter schools; in addition, it explores whether differences in contracted services in for-profits appear to correlate with differences in their outcomes. Despite the report's claims, it offers little evidence to remove skepticism from the debate over for-profit status. In addition, the report is limited in its focus on only Ohio, which has substantially more transparency than many states require for school choice options. As a result, the report offers little to inform policy and practice in dissimilar or nationwide contexts.
The Trickiness of Charter School Waitlists
NEPC Review: Pathways to Success: Exploring the Long-Term Outcomes of Alumni from Summit Public Schools (Summit Public Schools, September 2021)
Summit Public Schools reports that its alumni graduated from college at nearly double the national average and self-reported high levels of well-being, fulfillment, and workplace satisfaction. It also reports that alumni from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds now make more than $60,000 per year on average working full time. Although the study may provide some information useful to Summit’s internal decision-making, its serious methodological issues prevent it from having any implications for practice or policymaking in general.
Four Ways School Choice Worsens Segregation
NEPC Review: Charter School Funding: Dispelling Myths about EMOs, Expenditure Patterns, & Nonpublic Dollars (University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, October 2021)
Charter School Funding: Dispelling Myths about EMOs, Expenditure Patterns, & Nonpublic Dollars is the latest in a series of reports from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas that purports to show charter schools are inequitably funded compared to public district schools. The report relies on a proprietary dataset to make its claims; however, the data conflict with publicly reported figures, and the methods used to create the dataset are not documented. The report’s analysis ignores several basics of school finance: Differences in student characteristics and school programming are not accounted for, categorical spending is conflated with potential profit taking from charter management organizations, and philanthropic giving is inadequately evaluated. The sparse documentation of the report’s methods, combined with basic flaws in its analysis frameworks, render it useless in guiding charter school funding policy.
Charter Schools: Rending or Mending the Nation
NEPC Review: Charter School Funding: Support for Students with Disabilities (University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, July 2021)
A report from the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform asserts that charter schools, despite serving only marginally fewer children with disabilities than traditional public schools, are significantly shortchanged of funding for those children, in addition to being significantly shortchanged on funding in general. This assertion is erroneous because the report ignores substantial differences in the classifications, needs, and costs of children with disabilities in district-operated versus charter schools. To reach its incorrect conclusions, the report exclusively self-cites deeply flawed, self-published evidence of a general charter school funding gap, ignoring more rigorous studies yielding contradictory findings. The report adds no value to legitimate debate over the comparability or adequacy of general or special education funding of charter schools.
NEPC Review: Florida Versus Kentucky: School Choice Improves Public School Performance, Too (Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, May 2021)
As an increasing number of states adopt or expand choice programs in the form of charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts, questions grow about their efficacy. This review analyzes a recent report from Kentucky’s Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions claiming that NAEP score trends for Florida and Kentucky from the 1990s to 2019 exhibit sufficient evidence that choice programs catalyze significant educational improvement. This review rejects that determination for two reasons. First, the report overlooks the intensity of Florida’s focus on preparing students for annual state exams in reading and math since the implementation of its A+ Accountability Plan in 1999, which appears to have had a substantial impact on the state’s NAEP scores. Second, in focusing on Florida, the report fails to acknowledge that the majority of the top 10 states with choice programs (as measured by percentage of students enrolled in charter schools) fell short of Kentucky in posting gains on NAEP over this time period.
NEPC Review: Education Freedom and Student Achievement: Is More School Choice Associated with Higher State-Level Performance on the NAEP? (University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, March 2021)
A School Choice Demonstration Project report ranks states based on their expansion of market-oriented school policies such as vouchers, charters, homeschooling, and inter-district choice. It then compares this “education freedom” ranking to National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores, finding a positive correlation between “freedom” and these scores, and hints at a causal relationship between “education freedom” and student learning. However, the report ignores relevant peer-reviewed research that has found negative consequences of school choice reforms, and significant methodological flaws cast doubt on its findings. These shortcomings and others undermine the report’s conclusions and render it useless for purposes of guiding policymaking.
NEPC Review: Remote Learning Is Here to Stay: Results from the First American School District Panel Survey (RAND Corporation, December 2020)
The RAND Corporation released a report based on a national survey of school district superintendents and charter management organization directors about their experiences navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey asks non-biased questions about how school districts and charter schools have responded to the pandemic and about their greatest educational needs. But some issues arise with the report’s reporting of results and with one of its two recommendations. The report’s first recommendation does follow from the respondents’ need for more funding to address inequities and socio-emotional learning. But the other recommendation, for more funding to support remote learning, does not appear to align with needs expressed by district leaders. The report also combines two different types of local education agencies (school districts and CMOs), so it is unclear how much of the resulting answers are driven by each type. Readers are encouraged to go beyond the title and read deeper to get a complete picture of the challenges, needs, and future of education from district leaders’ perspectives.
NEPC Review: Religious Charter Schools: Legally Permissible? Constitutionally Required? (Manhattan Institute, December 2020)
The Manhattan Institute’s recent report concludes that the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue requires states to grant charters to religious organizations, including those that intend to deliver an explicitly religious curriculum that teaches religion as truth. While Espinoza involved a publicly financed private school tuition (voucher-like) program, the report reasons that its logic applies in full force to charter schools as well. Although this report does raise an important question and identifies the key issues for answering it, it excludes key federal and state case law necessary to fully and fairly analyze the issues. Similarly, it fails to acknowledge extensive key expert analysis on matters left unresolved by courts. The result is a one-sided analysis of the issue that is not a reliable basis for state action.
NEPC Review: Changes in the Performance of Students in Charter and District Sectors of U.S. Education: An Analysis of Nationwide Trends (The Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, September 2020)
The Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University published a research study titled Changes in the Performance of Students in Charter and District Sectors of U.S. Education: An Analysis of Nationwide Trends. Due to limitations explained in this review, the study fails to advance our knowledge of charter school effectiveness and offers no solid base for policy recommendations regarding whether charters merit more or less investment, nor any insight into what practices and changes might benefit the charter sector.