Q&A of the Day – Do Minorities Perform Better in Charter Schools?
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Today’s Entry: Brian, the Lt. Gov mentioned the outperformance of minorities in Charter schools. Do you have any stats to back that up?
Bottom Line: When recently talking with Florida’s Lt. Governor Jeanette Nunez, we discussed Florida’s Universal School Choice expansion, which will be available for Florida’s families for the upcoming 2023-2024 school year. Today’s question is on the back of Nunez specifically citing educational outperformance by Black and Hispanic students with the use of Florida’s school choice program to date – emphasizing the potential positive impact of the expansion. Given Florida’s extensive school choice program, which has been in place since the 2005-2006 school year – including having had the largest school choice program in the country for most of that time – we do have a lot of data on student performance. But before diving into Florida’s performance specifically, Stanford University just completed a national study on the use of charter schools which was released June 6th and is the most current information on student performance.
The Stanford study evaluated 1.8 million students at 6,200 charter schools. There were six key takeaways from the study according to researchers. They were these:
- Charter school performance has consistently improved over time
- Students of color performed better at charter schools
- Charter schools weren’t generally effective for students with disabilities
- There’s a significant variance in performance of charter schools by state
- Online charter school performance was poor
- Charter schools run by management organizations performed best
Obviously, the national assessment of charter schools wasn’t a ubiquitous win with outperformance everywhere. In general, most charter schools have unperformed with special needs students and online education. That said, there’s been consistent improvement with charter school performance over the past decade, and specific to today’s Q&A, we do see minority students benefiting the most from the use of charter schools. Specific to the findings, Education Week’s assessment of the study data found:
In both math and reading, students of color at charter schools performed better than their traditional public school peers. Black charter school students had 35 more days in reading growth and 29 more days in math growth than Black students in traditional public schools.
Hispanic charter school students also outpaced their peers, gaining 30 days in reading and 19 days in math over Hispanic students in traditional public schools.
Black and Hispanic students in poverty had even stronger results. Black charter students in poverty gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools, and Hispanic students in poverty gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.
That’s significant outperformance and speaks directly to what Lt. Governor Jeanette Nunez suggested. More specifically to Florida’s charter school performance, here’s the latest from the Florida Department of Education’s 2022 annual report:
- Charter Schools outperformed traditional public schools in 58 of 77 (75%) categories of student achievement
- The achievement gap between minority and white students was lower in 18 of 22 (81%) measured categories
So, Florida’s results are consistent with the results nationally. It’s clear minority students usually perform better in charter schools when compared to traditional public schools. Notably in Florida, largely due to Florida’s existing school choice program, 63.9% of charter school students most recently have been minorities. With universal school choice now lifting the annual caps on student enrollment, and with private schools also being an option, we’re likely to continue to see still stronger charter and private school use by minority families. History suggests the results will be exceedingly positive.
In recent years, Florida has achieved record high graduation rates. In 2004, preceding Florida’s school choice program, the high school graduation rate was only 59.2%. Most recently it’s 87.3%. It’s not a coincidence that as Florida’s school choice program has grown, and as more students of various backgrounds have taken advantage of it, we’ve seen the best outcomes in our state’s history.