Editor’s note: This analysis from Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and David Griffith, the Institute’s associate director of research, appeared last week on The 74.
Thirty years ago, when the charter school movement was just getting off the ground, devotees of big-city school systems worried that these new options would drain critical funding, hurt the kids who were left behind and make a system in which race played a central but often unacknowledged role even more unjust.
Yet, in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that concerns about charter-inflicted damage are misplaced — as demonstrated by a pair of new studies that find broad and statistically significant gains for all publicly enrolled students as charter schools expand.
If you’re familiar with the research on charter schools, these results shouldn’t be surprising. After all, for the better part of a decade, a steady stream of studies have found that enrolling in urban charters boosts the academic achievement of low-income Black and/or Hispanic students. For example, a 2015 CREDO analysis found that Black students in poverty gained almost nine weeks of learning in English and almost 12 weeks in math per year by attending an urban charter school instead of a traditional public school.
Other research has found that charter schools’ effects on the achievement of students in neighboring district schools are neutral to positive. For example, a recent review of the literature on this question identified nine studies that found positive effects, three that found negative effects and 10 that found no effects whatsoever.
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