What the Teachers' Union Doesn't Want You to Know About Charter Schools
This article originally apppeared in Forbes.
In an era of stagnating educational achievement and bloated public school budgets, America’s education system is in dire need of innovation. Despite strong opposition from entrenched interests, the growth in charter schools exemplifies educational innovation in cities and towns across the country.
Charter schools receive public funding but are independently operated. With more flexibility, they provide a worthwhile alternative to traditional public schools. In many areas, interest in charter schools is so high that they must conduct a lottery to determine which students will receive admittance. In 2014 in New York City, 70,700 students applied for 21,000 available places in charter schools. Nationwide, more than 1 million names are on a charter school waitlist, though some students’ names appear on more than one waitlist.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters has shown that charter schools are improving U.S. urban education. In the 2013–14 school year, 20% of students were enrolled in charters in 43 major school districts. Student performance generally rises substantially when they attend urban charter schools.
Teachers’ unions often fight charter schools by claiming that they are less accountable to students and families because many operate under less burdensome regulations than do traditional public schools. The real reason for their opposition, of course, is that charter school teachers are not unionized. The reality is that charter schools are much more accountable to young people and their parents than are traditional public schools. If parents do not like their children’s charter schools, they can send their kids elsewhere. This threat of exit gives charter schools an incentive to raise the quality of the education they offer in order to retain students.
Despite union scaremongering, the verdict is in on charter schools: The public favors them 2 to 1 Among African Americans, who are arguably the biggest beneficiaries of alternative schooling options, the favorability ratio is greater than 3 to 1. Even public school teachers desert the union position on charter schools by a slim margin—38% of teachers favor them, and 35% are opposed.
But what about the actual effects of charter schools on student achievement? Some of the best academic work in this area has been done by Stanford University economics professor Caroline Hoxby; Sonali Muraka, of the New York City Department of Education; and Jenny Kang, of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
It is difficult to distinguish between the effects of the charter schools and the effects of the type of students who choose to attend them. If better-educated parents choose charter schools, their children might show higher achievement no matter what school they attend. If higher-achieving students tend to go to charter schools, then looking at test scores will show that charter school students score higher than traditional public school students, but this could be due to student selection rather than to the quality of the school itself.
In order to maneuver around this selection problem, Hoxby and her colleagues conducted an experiment. Since oversubscribed charter schools must conduct lotteries to select students, part of a pool of charter school applicants will attend the charter school, and the other part, the part that does not win the lottery, will attend traditional public school. Everyone in this pool applied to the charter school, so we no longer have to worry about prior differences between applicants and non-applicants. Hoxby and her colleagues simply compared the achievement of lottery winners with lottery losers to measure the effect of the charter school. This type of study is the gold standard for economic literature.
Hoxby and her colleagues conducted a study designed in this way on New York City’s school system, where 94% of students who apply to charter schools go through lotteries. The authors found that a student who attended a charter school would close 86% of the “Scarsdale–Harlem achievement gap” in math and 66% in reading. The gap represents the difference in student achievement, measured by test scores, between one of the wealthiest neighborhoods around New York City (Scarsdale) and one of the poorest (Harlem). By the end of eighth grade, students who attended a charter school could expect to score 30 points higher on a standardized math test than their peers who missed out on the lottery, substantially narrowing the gap between schools in wealthy and poor neighborhoods.
Additionally, charter schools are doing more with less money; a 2014 report found that, on average, charter schools receive 28% less funding per student than do traditional public schools.
Even so, the study probably underestimates the beneficial effect of charter schools on student achievement. With increasing competition from charter schools, traditional public schools have greater incentives to improve quality in order to retain students. Moreover, charter schools will learn from one another over time about the most effective methods of teaching and management. For instance, Hoxby’s New York City study has already found an association between a longer school year and better results from charter schools.
In “Please Stop Helping Us,” Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason L. Riley gives us another real-world example of the benefits of charter schools. Success Academy Harlem I, a charter school, shares a building with P.S. 149, a traditional public school. Despite the same location and same socioeconomic composition of the two student bodies, the achievement gap between the schools is substantial. At Harlem I, 86% of students are proficient in reading and 94% are proficient in math. At P.S. 149, only 29% of students are proficient in reading and only 34% are proficient in math.
The success at Academy Harlem I does not stand alone. Success Academy Bronx 2 had the second-highest math proficiency in New York State, even though the school is in the nation’s poorest congressional district. More than 80% of Success Academy students live in families with incomes below the poverty line, but students all across the Success Academy network are excelling. If all 32 schools in the Success Academy network were a single, large school, it would rank seventh out of the 3,560 New York State schools in math. Overall, 94% of Success Academy students are proficient in math and 64% are proficient in English-language arts. The averages for New York City are 35% and 29%, respectively.
Some attempt to demonize charter schools, but not based on their positive results. Instead, the critique is that they reduce teachers’ union power. But when it comes to an educational innovation that helps students, there is no justification to limit its growth for the sake of protecting politically-powerful unions.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is director of Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute and Jared Meyer is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. They are the coauthors of “Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying America’s Young,” from which this was adapted. Follow Diana on Twitter @FurchtgottRoth and Jared @JaredMeyer10.
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