School choice in other places: New York City

I wrote two days ago about how charter school performance over time in Boston really starts to outshine performance of students left in the traditional public school system.

Boston isn’t the only place where this charter school advantage has been discovered.

New York City charter schools also show a similar impact in another random sample like ‘lottery report,’ this one from Stanford University’s Professor Caroline Hoxby.

In “How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement,” Hoxby took advantage of the extensive lottery process in the Big Apple’s charter schools to develop a randomly selected comparison group of students who were in the traditional public school system. She created graphs similar to the one we looked at Tuesday in the Boston analysis.

Here is how New York City’s charter school students outdistance their traditional public school peers over time in mathematics. As was true with the Boston Foundation graph from two days ago, the blue horizontal line along the zero axix shows the traditional public school performance. The red and green lines show the relatively better, and growing over time, performance of charter school students as they spend more time in charter schools.


Here is the same depiction, but this time for English Language Arts (ELA). Once again, the steady gain in performance over time of the charter school students is unmistakable.


So, once again, as The Boston Foundation and the CREDO studies show, when researchers consider charter school performance over time, charter school students come out strong winners.

By the way, Hoxby also found that:

“Charter schools have about the same effect on achievement regardless of the student's race, ethnicity, or gender.”

In other words, they work well for all students.