Charter schools are publicly funded but operate outside the regulatory
framework and collective bargaining agreements characteristic of
traditional public schools. In return for this freedom, charter schools
are subject to heightened accountability. This paper estimates the
impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data
from Boston, where charter schools enroll a growing share of students.
We also evaluate an alternative to the charter model, Boston's pilot
schools. These schools have some of the independence of charter
schools, but operate within the school district, face little risk of
closure, and are covered by many of same collective bargaining
provisions as traditional public schools. Estimates using student
assignment lotteries show large and significant test score gains for
charter lottery winners in middle and high school. In contrast,
lottery-based estimates for pilot schools are small and mostly
insignificant. The large positive lottery-based estimates for charter
schools are similar to estimates constructed using statistical controls
in the same sample, but larger than those using statistical controls in
a wider sample of schools. The latter are still substantial, however.
The estimates for pilot schools are smaller and more variable than
those for charters, with some significant negative effects.
Did the authors control for other factors and parse the statistics carefully? One of the authors is Joshua Angrist, nuff said.
Most people have no idea who’s Joshua Angrist, so it’s not very much “nuff said”…
Cliff and Tomasz are no doubt be much better typists than me but even so I cannot believe they could write those comments quicker than I could copy / paste Joshua Angrist into google and at least get a 1st approximation of the likelhood he meets approval or disapproval in Alex’s eyes.
Part of the fun of this blog is that Tyler and Alex do not bend over backwards to break everything down into digestible little bits for everyone.
I especially love listening to Tyler’s economic analysis. It is always a challenge but it helps me learn.
Jdm, I’ve asked that before. Once of the answers I got that it had to do with the formats in which they wrote their papers. Apparently, text editor-> Latex -> pdf/ps/whatever wasn’t how it was done. since they didn’t use a typesetter, they didn’t generally format their papers easily into standard templates for their journals, and therefore, they didn’t want to spend time creating preprints because it was an added layer of difficulty.
Bill, please post links to these studies.
I found the ungated report in a google cache.
In the summary and conclusions, they mention (as a possible explanation):
“The student-teacher ratio is much smaller in the charter schools, and the school day and school year are considerably longer.”
Both those factors are already well-known to be very important to student achievement. Because they have not controlled for those factors, they have no real evidence that charter schools do better: they have at best gotten results consistent with long known educational principles.
Unions have long agitated for better student-teacher ratios, and have greatly improved the ratios in Boston through the contract negotiation process. They tend to be neutral on the day and year length issues (with the caveat that longer hours and more days should result in more pay.)
Disclosure: I’m a Boston Teacher’s Union member.
Mike, I don’t think student-teacher ratio or length of school day/year are factors that should be controlled for in a study of school effectiveness. Suppose that these factors alone explained 100% of the charter schools’ positive effect. The fact remains that charter schools provide these advantages while traditional schools do not. If charter schools do so with the same expenditure per pupil as traditional schools, then it may be that charter schools operate/contract more efficiently and thus have funds to implement these student-centered policies.
A union agitating for better student-teacher ratios does not create money for the realization of this demand (the school district probably wants more teachers, too). I would have liked for this paper to show (carefully) the estimated expenditure per pupil so that we can compare along the cost dimension as well as quality. Of course all schools could do better if they had unlimited funding, but they don’t, so I want to know how finite education dollars can be put to the best use.
We have to remember that much of public schooling is really private schooling.
For example, while I am purchasing a house right now, the difference between a nearly identical houses in nearly identical neighborhoods, one with a C+ ranked school and one with an A ranked school is about $400,000+. Note, that a C ranked school is still going to cost you $400,000+.
In that kind of reality, public schools are simply private schools for people who find the concept of private schools un-hip. You can pat yourself on the back at what a progressive open-minded person you are, sending your kid to public school, and at the same time not have to worry about any students whose parents can’t afford $900,000+ in real estate. And if the schools don’t perform, you can leave whenever you want for a school that does, because that is the reality when you aren’t poor.
Considering that a fully private ‘private’ school only costs about $20,000 a year at the high end (and often even less), many public schools are more extremely inaccessible than some of the very elite private schools. So, to say that charter schools don’t do well compared to the de-facto privatized schools is definitely a flaw.
I would imagine if you compare charter schools to the failing urban schools of the inner city, charters universally win… and realistically, escaping the public school system and making it into a charter school is pretty much the only option for escaping the ghetto for a poor black kid in Detroit or DC. Most urban public schools are simply preparatory institutions for adulthood incarceration. It is a way for Democrats to buy votes with the teachers unions, and a way for the Republicans to get money from the prison industrial complex (who make billions on our failing public schools, and so have the largest incentive to see the teacher-union zero-responsibility model continue).
Vehical Driver:
You make an interesting point about many public schools being inaccessible, except for one thing: to get into a top public school, the parents just have to have money. To get into a elite private school, unless you are talking about incredible money, simply having the tuition money won’t necessarily get your kids in. If you have the money for a $900k house you can get your kid as many of the benefits of a top notch education as they can take advantage of, even if they aren’t talented enough (or your social status isn’t high enough) to get them into elite private schools.
“It bears repeating that the lottery results reported here do not estimate overall charter and pilot school elects, even for Boston. Rather, the lottery results are generated by schools that parents find most appealing and, in the case of charter schools, those that have well-documented lotteries and that continue to operate.”
It seems that the data reporting was voluntary, and poorly performing charter schools may not have been added to the estimates.
As a student in one of the co-author’s class, I’d say this is one of the better studies on charters and traditional public school alternatives.
Angrist also has a great text on econometrics.
If you really want to read about charter school performance you can find most of the premier studies using google scholar.
Dobbie & Fryer, Hoxby & Murarka, Bifulco & Ladd, CREDO, etc. << they’re all there
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