Charter Schools

This study of Charter Schools is interesting. Also, good news for those who support Charter Schools.

Compared to students in the nearest regular public school, charter students are 4 percent more likely to be proficient in reading and 2 percent more likely to be proficient in math, on their state's exams. Compared to students in the nearest regular public school with a similar racial composition, charter students are 5 percent more likely to be proficient in reading and 3 percent more likely to be proficient in math. As a rule, the charter schools' proficiency "advantage" is larger when the comparison school has a similar racial composition.

This is not a perfect study, for example it has no way to tell to what degree these students differ from the average student in the nearest school. For example, a student could be self selecting into the charter school program because of either higher parental involvement (thus we would expect them to do better than average) or because of poor achievement in regular schools (thus we would expect them to do poorer than average). Nonetheless it strikes me as the best study done so far on charter schools and it seems to be very good news.