Charter Schools Get Better Results
Parents are moving their children from government school district schools to charter schools in increasing numbers and have been doing so for the past four years. So confirms a report titled Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends, released in December by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Charter School Success in the Big Apple
According to a recent Fox News report, New York City charter school students scored 7 percentage points higher on state English exams, with 59 percent of charter students earning a passing grade versus 52 percent of government school students. Charter students scored 13 percentage points higher on math exams, with 63 percent of charter students passing opposed to just 50 percent of government school students.
Fox interviewed American Federation for Children Senior Fellow Corey DeAngelis for the report. DeAngelis pointed out that “charter schools are doing more with less,” as New York City spends about $36,000 per government school student per year, with spending on charter-school students some 20 percent less.
He explained that charter schools have to cater to the needs of their customers. “Underperforming charter schools get shut down; underperforming government schools just get more money year after year.” He further noted that “charter schools are accountable to families and their children,” whereas government schools “are accountable to the teachers’ unions.”
DeAngelis predicts that when test score discrepancies become known, the familiar excuse will be that the government schools need more money. The teachers’ unions “will continue to try to restrict their competition as much as possible,” he said. “They did this already with the enrollment cap on charter school students in New York City, where 30,000 to 40,000 students are on wait lists as parents try to find better opportunities for their kids’ education.”
DeAngelis said all options should be on the table for parents, including charter schools and private schools. He charged that the teachers’ unions and the Democrat party have a “never ending money laundering scheme” whereby the money goes to the unions, gets funneled back to the Democrats, and then to the government schools. “Wash, rinse, repeat,” he said. “This is all about power dynamics. It’s nothing to do with logic or what’s right for the kids ... Test scores are just one part of the story and parents are voting with their feet for charter schools in record numbers.”
Since 2019, New York charter school enrollment is up 10 percent, while government school enrollment is down 3½ percent. “Kids don’t belong to the government,” DeAngelis said. “Parents should make the decision” where their children go to school.
Alliance researchers studied enrollment data from 2019 through 2023 in both charter schools and government school district schools. Among the findings: Charter school enrollment has climbed 9 percent since 2019 while government-school district enrollment declined 3.5 percent. And this does not include the thousands of students across the country who are languishing in district schools while their names remain hopefully on charter-school waiting lists.
In a press release, Debbie Veney, Senior Vice President, Communications and Marketing at the National Alliance and report co-author stated: “Charter schools are the only piece of public education that is steadily growing. Where there is space, families want seats in charter schools. And when a good public-school option is not available, families are leaving public education altogether. This trend should serve as a rallying cry to anyone who believes we can keep telling parents to just accept whatever is given to them.”
Drew Jacobs, Senior Director, Policy, Research, & Evaluation and also co-author of the report added: “Families seized the opportunity to select educational options that work better for their students, including charter schools. The result of continued charter enrollment growth and district enrollment loss has held steady over several years.”
A December op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) noted that 2023 was “the year for school choice — from vouchers to homeschooling to pod schools with parents who use education savings accounts. The winners include charter schools, as union-run K-12 schools lost hundreds of thousands of students during Covid-19 who haven’t returned.”
The WSJ complained that while attendance and achievement are up in charter schools, particularly among black and Hispanic students, “these improvements remain too much at the margin, and unions still dominate K-12 school governance in most places. Charters face relentless hostility from school boards and politicians who deny equal funding or co-location in buildings where public schools are losing students and there is room.”
The op-ed went on to note that parents in general like choice options, and “as most students in most charters outperform those in nearby public schools, parents like having the ability to escape schools where failure reigns.” The article cited New Jersey as an example of where “the growing demand for charters might be eroding political resistance to school choice in a state where public unions have traditionally all but run the government in Trenton ... Elected officials ignore the new political dynamics at their peril.”
In New York City, charter school students outperformed district government school students by a significant margin on recent standardized tests. (See sidebar, this page). The New York Post opined that “New York’s 25-year experiment with charters has proved they work.... Which leaves all the special interests that feed off the regular public-school system desperate to choke off charter growth, with teacher-union power in particular muscling lawmakers into outright hostility.”
The Post recommends that caps limiting the number of charters allowed in New York City and statewide be lifted, given that charter schools receive thousands of dollars less than district government schools, have more freedom to adopt innovative approaches since they are run outside the purview of the state’s department of education, and outperform their district school counterparts overall.
Commenters on the Post article made additional salient points about charter schools. One person noted that charter schools can more easily expel troublemakers than district government schools so as “to maintain a learning environment.” Another noted that “charter schools offer advanced math and science classes” whereas district schools are dropping such classes because they have been deemed unfair or as promoting inequality. But parents want such classes available to children who qualify and are interested in taking them.
About charter schools
As their name suggests, charter schools operate under unique “charters” or contracts between organizers and sponsors. Organizers may be groups of parents or teachers, community leaders and members, or a combination of these; sponsors may be for-profit education companies.
Charter schools are considered “public” schools but some critics charge that they should more aptly be described as private schools because they operate independently of traditional government school districts.
While advocates insist that charter schools are “open to all students,” the reality is that many charters have at least some control over student admittance. Many have a distinct focus, such as STEM education, the fine arts, or foreign language immersion, for example.
Some charter schools are smaller, some larger; some boast a more rigorous curriculum, such as a classical curriculum, and some are more project focused. This is not to suggest that all charter schools are automatically a better option, although many are. Regardless, the rising popularity of charter schools indicates that, like the school choice movement overall, many parents are finding charters a more viable option than the teachers’ union-directed government schools.
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