Jay P. Greene, Greg Forster, and Marcus A. Winters, Manhattan Institute
July 2003
Yet another attempt to answer the question: do charter schools raise student achievement? The issue is vexing, since most studies that compare charters to regular district schools don't take into account the kinds of students that charters tend to serve - low-income, minority, and other traditionally low-achieving populations. Now enter Manhattan Institute's Greene, Forster, and Winters with this study, which they say is the first useful comparison between charter schools and similar district schools. The authors strive to get beyond the skimpy school demographics available and to exclude "targeted" charter schools, i.e, those serving very specific populations (juvenile offenders, single mothers, extremely low-income students) on the legitimate grounds that these skew achievement data downward. The result is modest but significant: their sample of charter and "regular" schools in eleven states shows the former outperforming the latter by 3 percentage points (0.08 standard deviations) for students starting at the 50th percentile in math, and two percentage points (0.04 standard deviations) in reading. In some states (Texas and Florida, for example), the gains were even higher. This study is worth looking at, though it hasn't a hope of quelling the debate on whether charters raise student achievement more - or less - than "regular" public schools. Stuck with a paucity of hard data about such matters, the authors rely heavily on self-reporting by schools to determine which ones serve "targeted" populations, and they use "geography to control for demography" by comparing charters to the physically closest district school, a useful but hardly definitive way of pairing similar schools. Nobody has a flawless methodology here and nobody has straightforward data. Kudos to Jay Greene and associates for this valiant and generally enlightening effort. Take a look at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_01.htm.