☆ Educational researcher: CA should be analyzing why some charters succeed and others fail
Stanford University's 2023 National Charter School Study spells out encouraging news for California charter schools, in which historically disadvantaged students perform better than their trad zip-code school “twins.” But their findings only tell half of the story, says the University of Illinois' Paul Bruno (an experienced researcher of CA charter schools). In this Opp Now exclusive, Bruno unpacks Stanford's results, and why we should study the factors behind large disparities between charters.
Opportunity Now: This study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford suggests that—when compared to similar public school students—Californian charter school students outperform their counterparts. This seems pretty straightforward to us, but analyzing scientific data is never quite this simple, right?
Paul Bruno: The team that put out this study has a very reasonable approach, which I appreciate. However, we should still be cautious when interpreting some of their estimates. While they do a good job trying to find comparable “twins” to charter school students, there are lots of potential differences that are difficult for us or them to observe.
For instance, according to the study, why do white and special education students appear to do much worse at CA'n charters? It's hard to know why a student has left their traditional public school: e.g., income level, disability status, negative experiences at their previous school. So it's possible that this student, who has started attending a charter, isn't prioritizing academic programs but is just looking to exit their former situation. Also, the charter might be serving them well in other ways that we're not seeing, just not particularly in math and reading instruction.
ON: This makes CREDO's specific findings a bit more murky, since we can't pinpoint exactly why the numbers are the way they are.
PB: Yes, we don't know what specifically charter schools are doing that are leading to these results—
ON: —another one being that historically disadvantaged kids perform better at CA's charters than at our public schools.
PB: If there are particular advantages for educationally disadvantaged kids of attending charters (which it seems like from the study), that's consistent with what we know about charters' geographic placement. Charters are often located precisely where they think there will be demand (e.g., places with academically weak traditional public schools).
As a country, if we choose to allocate educational opportunities as unequally as we do, we shouldn't be surprised that attempting to provide additional services has bigger benefits for Black, Hispanic, and low-income kids. They likely weren't served well by their existing schools, yet some of the more privileged students had stronger options like expensive private schools.
ON: And before local charter schools get too excited, their academic advantage in CA wasn't as large as in some other states. Are those other charters just that much better?
PB: I wouldn't be super confident about that conclusion. It's possible CA's traditional schools are helping more in certain areas, thus making charters seem less effective. Again, this is a strong study but doesn't tell us what individual schools are doing differently from each other.
ON: So how can local leaders support charter schools, given that they're a helpful option for at least some CA'n students?
PB: I'd point them to opportunities to work with the charter sector more. The CREDO study suggests that charters have become more effective over time. If this is true, it's consistent with people's hopes of what would happen: that the sector would learn and improve from experience over time. With this, we should be probing into which local charter schools are effective and why. We should take steps to increase accountability (e.g., closing charters that aren't adequately performing).
Here's my main takeaway: It's not just about overall numbers, about extra days in the school year. The big thing we should see in this study's findings—and those from similar studies—is how different charters are from each other. There's a ton of variation between charters in terms of effectiveness. And because many charters appear to differ in such major ways, we should be digging deeper into that part of the study. Why are some charters performing highly and others not? With this information, we can improve our existing charter system.
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