Charter Schools Might Be Doing Some Good

See Charter Schools and Student Performance: One study of 29 countries found that the level of competition among schools was directly tied to higher test scores in reading and math. It was in the 3-16-10 WSJ, p. A23. Excerpts:

"...the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms." "Ms. Ravitch and other critics of school choice reverse causation by blaming the sad state of public schools on events that occurred long after schools had stagnated. They point, for example, to President Bush's No Child Left Behind law (enacted in 2002), mayoral governance of schools recently instituted in some cities, and the creation of a small number (4,638) of charter schools that serve less than 3% of the U.S. school-age population." "One needs to consider the impact of restrictive collective bargaining agreements that prevent rewarding good teachers and removing ineffective ones, intrusive court interventions, and useless teacher certification laws." "...charters must persuade parents to select them instead of a neighborhood district school. That has happened with such regularity that today there are 350,000 families on charter-school waiting lists, enough to fill over 1,000 additional charter schools." "Among African Americans, those who favor charters outnumber opponents four to one." "Union leaders would have us believe that charter popularity is due to the "motivated" students who attend them, not the education they provide. But charters hold lotteries when applications exceed available seats. As a result—and also because they are usually located in urban areas—over half of all charter students are either African American or Hispanic." "The best studies are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and educational research. Stanford University's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University's Thomas Kane have conducted randomized experiments that compare students who win a charter lottery with those who applied but were not given a seat." "...lottery winners subsequently scored considerably higher on math and reading tests than did applicants who remained in district schools." "...the RAND Corp. found that charter high school graduation rates and college attendance rates were better than regular district school rates by 15 percentage points and eight percentage points respectively." "...charter critics rely heavily on a report released in 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is hardly a disinterested investigator..." "... a report from an ongoing study by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo), which found that there are more weak charter schools than strong ones." "... its results are dominated by a large number of students who are in their first year at a charter school and a large number of charter schools that are in their first year of operation." "...the greater the competition between the public and private sector, the better all students do in math, science and reading."

The author was PAUL E. PETERSON. Mr. Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard University and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, is author of the forthcoming book "Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning" (Belknap/Harvard University Press).