A new report from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) evaluates recent charter school performance in Texas. The study compares the math and reading growth for charter students and their traditional public school peers in the Lone Star State from 2011–2015. The report also examines the effects of a 2014 Texas law ushering in stricter charter regulations. These results build on CREDO’s 2015 evaluation of Texas charters.
At the time of the study, Texas had 659 charters with available data on more than 280,000 students. Those pupils were matched to peers from nearby traditional public schools (TPS) based on race/ethnicity, grade level, prior academic achievement, free and reduced lunch eligibility, English proficiency, and special education designation. The study examined growth rather than proficiency, looking at the overall health of charter performance, in addition to how well the charter sector is affecting the performance of Texas’ most vulnerable student populations.
The results are positive, with charter school students seeing improvement in reading by .03 standard deviations (SD), which CREDO equates to an additional seventeen days of learning, when compared with their TPS peers. As for math, there were not significant differences between the scores of charter and TPS students. While these numbers aren’t staggering, they are great news for the Texas charter school sector, which had math growth of -.04 SD (twenty-three fewer days of instruction) and ELA growth of -.02 SD (eleven fewer days) in CREDO’s 2015 study. The new results show that not only are Texas charters showing dramatic improvement, but for the first time they are showing stronger academic growth than traditional public schools.
Yet there’s striking variation among Texas charters and their pupils. Hispanic students, who comprise about 64 percent of the Texas charter population, are seeing the most dramatic academic gains, While they still lag far behind their white TPS peers, they are closing the gap faster than their Hispanic TPS counterparts with .05 SD (twenty-nine days) and .03 SD (seventeen days) higher growth in reading and math, respectively. Other groups, however, fared less well. CREDO found that black pupils, students with special needs, and English language learners in charter schools all saw equivalent or negative growth as compared with their TPS peers.
Moreover, while most Texas charters are achieving greater growth than TPS, almost one third of them see less—a situation that the state’s new regulations are meant to remedy by better replicating the good schools and closing the bad.
The concern now is whether these rules can effectively hold schools accountable without strangling innovation. The final year of the study saw a dramatic increase in charter closures and a decline in new ones, and some evidence that Texas charters are on the right track to closing achievement gaps. Choice advocates and policymakers should continue to take note as the law continues to take effect to see if it is a cautionary tale or recipe for success.
SOURCE: “Charter School Performance in Texas,” The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (August 2017).
