The National Center for Education Statistics just released a report that finds that traditional schools are outperforming charter schools in reading and mathematics, even after adjusting for student characteristics. The study also found that charter schools not affiliated with a public school district scored significantly lower on average than public noncharter schools. On the surface, this suggests that government school students, both in traditional and public charter schools, come out on top.
The study includes several important caveats. First, it notes, “the data are obtained from an observational study rather than a randomized experiment, so the estimated effects should not be interpreted in terms of causal relationships.” In other words, this study does not mean that charter schools produce lower-performing students. It is possible that some parents enrolled their under-performing child in a charter school to escape a traditional school, and it takes a while to decontaminate the student. This is related to a second concern that, “students currently enrolled in charter schools have spent different amounts of time in one or more such schools.” We can assume that children who spend more time in a charter school will perform better than those who recently transferred to the school will. The research model is unable to control for this factor.
