In January, 2010 the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), released their study: Charter School Performance in New York City. It is a similar to an earlier in-depth study,  Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, released in June, 2009, but didn’t include their work on the charter schools in New York City. Using the same methodological approach to the study as in Multiple Choice, the New York City study found that there are definite groups of students that benefit from a charter school environment.

This report analyzes six years of schooling, from the 2003-04 school years and ending with the 2008-09 data. The study included a total of 20,640 charter school students from 49 charter schools.  The students in the study were in grades 3-8. The study was able to utilize virtual comparison students for the analysis. There were virtual matches for 85 percent of the charter school students.

State achievement tests served as the common comparison for the two sets of students was the. Basically the study sought to find out if the charter school students outperformed the traditional school students in the state achievement tests.

As the report indicates, “Overall the results found that the typical student in a New York City charter school learns more than their virtual counterparts in their feeder pool in reading and mathematics. In school-by-school comparisons New York City charters perform relatively better in math than in reading. In math, more than half the charter schools are showing academic growth that is statistically larger than their students would have achieved in their regular public schools.”

In a school-to-school comparison for both math and reading, various conclusions can be drawn. In math 50 percent of the charter school students outperformed the traditional school students.  33 percent of the charter schools showed no change in learning math for their students compared to traditional schools, while 16 percent of the charter schools had significantly lower learning.

In a school-to-school comparison for reading 30 percent of the charter students outperformed the traditional students, 12 percent had worse results and approximately 60 percent of the charter schools showed no difference in the reading scores when compared to the traditional students.

The report summarized, “New charter schools students show a significant loss of learning in reading but a significant benefit in math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.” Essentially the advantage in reading for charter students is 2 scale points, while the charter school students are about 5 scale points higher in mathematics.

 

This table provides a demographic profile of the New York City charter students of the study and the subset of students that were used as the matches for the analysis.

 

Summary of Findings

New York City charter schools provide significantly better results for the following groups of students:

 

At the same time, the analysis showed the charter schools performed significantly worse with the following groups of students:

 

For the remaining groups in the analysis, there was no discernable difference between charter school and traditional public school performance. In summary, the charter school students did better when compared to traditional public school students.  The report also found that charter school education is more successful for students in key groups such as Blacks and Hispanics in both subjects, students who had a history of not doing well in traditional schools, students in poverty, students who had been enrolled for at least two years, and all students in math.