“As charter schools play an increasingly central role in education reform agendas across the
United States, it becomes more important to have current and comprehensible analysis about
how well they do educating their students. Thanks to progress in student data systems and
regular student achievement testing, it is possible to examine student learning in charter schools
and compare it to the experience the students would have had in the traditional public schools
(TPS) they would otherwise have attended. This report presents a longitudinal student‐level
analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in
the United States. The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter
school impacts.
Charter schools are permitted to select their focus, environment and operations and wide
diversity exists across the sector. This study provides an overview that aggregates charter
schools in different ways to examine different facets of their impact on student academic
growth.
The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction
of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students.
Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local
public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly
worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.
These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter
school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy
challenge is how to deal constructively with varying levels of performance today and into the
future.”
