Kentucky Tonight – Lots of Charter School Myths #4

As I mentioned in #3 in this Charter School Myths series, a 2009 report called “Informing the Debate, Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools” found charters notably outperformed the regular school system that city.

This graph from the report may help make that clearer. It is based on a very strong investigational method where performance of students who won lotteries to enter charter schools are compared to results for students who also entered those lotteries but didn’t win a charter school slot. This is basically a random-sample approach, which is the gold standard for similar research efforts.


The report says this graph plots the scores of lottery winners [shown by the green line for English Language Arts (ELA) and by the gray line (math)] to lottery losers scores (represented by the constant zero horizontal black colored axis line) over grades in middle and high school charter schools. The report concludes, “The relatively steep upward slopes of the lines suggest that Charter School impacts increase over the course of school.”

In other words, charter middle schools in Boston provided stronger educations for students, and the amount of that extra education increased as students remained in the charter schools for longer periods of time.

The report indicates that relative rise for math performance in charter schools equates to moving from the 50th to the 69th percentile of student performance, or erasing about half of the white to black achievement gap. The report terms this an “extraordinarily large” increase.

Does this look like evidence of “a failed reform” to you?

It doesn’t look like a failure to folks in the know in Massachusetts, either.