It should be common knowledge by now that all charter schools—like all district schools and, for that matter, all private schools—are not created equal. Nor do they produce equal outcomes. Specifically, we’ve seen time and time again that treating the charter sector as a monolith can obscure the strong results of brick-and-mortar charter schools. That’s because virtual charters, for the most part, don’t do nearly as well. And that’s part of the reason why serious scholars who study outcomes in charter schools get aggravated when other presumably serious scholars lump together in their analyses brick-and-mortar and virtual schools. Efforts to study them separately should be the norm. Thankfully, Temple University’s Sarah Cordes knows that and proceeds to examine the short- and long-term outcomes of Pennsylvania charter schools—including student achievement, attendance, high school graduation, and college enrollment and persistence—with a specific eye toward the differences between brick-and-mortar and virtual schools.
Roughly 8 percent of Pennsylvania students are enrolled in charter schools, and about one-third of those are enrolled in grades 9–12. About half of charter high school students are in urban districts, with about 32 percent in suburban districts and 15 percent in rural districts. Pennsylvania is also home to one of the largest virtual charter sectors in the country: As of 2020, these schools enrolled 175,000 kids, or 2.1 percent of the total public school population, i.e., roughly a quarter of all charter pupils. Note that, in Pennsylvania, virtual charters are authorized by the state, while brick-and-mortar charters are authorized by school districts.
The sample for Cordes’s study includes all members of the ninth-grade cohorts of 2012 or 2013, as long as those students had been enrolled in Pennsylvania public schools in eighth grade and have sufficient baseline data. They must also be continuously enrolled in the fall of every year from ninth through twelfth grade and be able to be matched along a number of dimensions with at least one traditional public school (TPS) student, as well as one charter student. These “matched cell fixed effects” essentially mean that charter students are compared to district students from the same school in the same cohort, and share the same race, gender, and baseline test scores. Cordes is evaluating the intent-to-treat effect of charter school enrollment since treatment status is based solely on enrollment decisions made in the fall of ninth grade, with those students who enroll in a charter school after grade nine assigned to the comparison group.
Brick-and-mortar charter students in her sample are much more likely to be Black, economically disadvantaged, and eligible for special-education services than their district peers, as well as lower performing and more often chronically absent. Virtual charter students are more likely to have repeated a grade, but share similar characteristics with charter students in physical locations.
Brick-and-mortar charters show positive or null effects across all outcomes. For instance, their students see an increase in algebra scores of 0.04 standard deviations (with smaller increases in English language arts and biology) and an increase in attendance by 1.2 percentage points. Brick-and-mortar charters also tend to shift postsecondary enrollment from two- to four-year institutions, specifically making it more likely that students enroll in four-year institutions by roughly 6 percentage points over their district peers. But they have no effects on high school graduation or initial postsecondary enrollment. Positive effects are largely concentrated among Black and economically disadvantaged students and those living in urban districts—results which mimic prior studies. The effects for White students are null or just slightly positive or slightly negative, depending on the outcome.
Virtual charters, on the other hand, are associated with mostly worse outcomes. Compared to students who enrolled in district schools at the start of ninth grade, virtual school students are 9.5 percentage points less likely to graduate, nearly 17 percentage points less likely to enroll in college, and 15 percentage points less likely to persist in a postsecondary institution beyond one semester. The only measure that is positive is attendance: Virtual charter schooling is linked to a 1.8 percentage point increase in attendance and a 4.5 percentage point decrease in chronic absenteeism. On the one hand, these attendance results may reflect the preference of families opting for virtual charters because they need more flexible school schedules due to work or family obligations. But they could also reflect less rigorous definitions of attendance at virtual charters, which might mean simply logging on at any point in the day for any amount of time, or stipulated participation or contact with teachers, without thought to the extent or quality of involvement.
Cordes’s findings replicate previous research on virtual charters—both the good and the bad—and reinforce what should now be accepted wisdom that these schools don’t work equally well for all students. But they do work for some, and they remain popular options in states across the country. So it’s vital that we keep working to improve virtual schools themselves, as well as the policies and infrastructure on which they rely. Meanwhile, however, serious evaluations of charter school effectiveness should always distinguish between brick-and-mortar and virtual environments.
SOURCE: Sarah A. Cordes, “Cyber versus Brick and Mortar: Achievement, Attainment, and Postsecondary Outcomes in Pennsylvania Charter High Schools,” Education Finance and Policy (February 2023).
