Good news from charter schools

Radio New Zealand told me this morning that, according to copies of Education Review Office reports RNZ had been shown, two of the early group of charter schools have been found to be doing well ('Big ticks for charter schools').

I'm delighted to hear it. Charter schools have the potential to address what is one of our main educational challenges: the long tail of underachievers in our public schools. To be clear: our educational performance on average is pretty good, and we score well on international comparisons like the PISA ones. But there's a large group at the bottom who struggle. For one reason or another, the standard state school isn't working for them.

What's encouraging about the experience overseas is that the main positive impact of charter schools tends to be the improved performance of precisely those groups who struggle most in the traditional schools. Here's what the big (many would say definitive) study of charter schools in the US had to say (executive summary here, pdf):

Looking back to the demographics of the charter school sector in the 27 states, charter school enrollment has expanded among students in poverty, black students, and Hispanic students. These are precisely the students that, on average, find better outcomes in charter schools. These findings lend support to the education and social policies that focus on education as the mechanism to improve life chances for historically underserved students. Charter schools are especially beneficial learning environments for these students (p18)

Enrollment and persistence in charter schools is especially helpful for some students, particularly students in poverty, black students, and English language learners all of whom post significantly higher learning gains in both reading and math. Hispanic students are on par with their TPS [traditional public school] peers in both reading and math. For students with multiple designations (such as being black and in poverty), the impacts of charter schooling are especially positive and noteworthy (pp23-4)

It's interesting to see that on these early ERO findings the same thing is happening here. RNZ quoted the ERO report on Vanguard Military School as finding that "A significant proportion of students have not experienced success in their previous schools. At this school they are responding positively to adults' high expectations".

Just what you'd expect when you get a variety of options, where students have more opportunity to match up what they want with a school that provides it. As usual, greater choice, more competition and more innovation work, and they work most for those who had least choice previously - typically those on the outer, for one reason or another.

Neither of these two schools, by the way, would have worked for me or my wife or our kids - Vanguard, according to an earlier report by RNZ, has gone for "the ethos and training methodology of the military", and South Auckland Middle School for "project-based learning based on Christian philosophy and values". But then there are lots of people who'd have hated the school I did well at (and others did well there too, if they were either academic or rugby-playing - the rest, not so much).

And that's the whole point. Students need to be able to access the approach that best suits them. Vanguard and South Auckland are just the ticket for some kids who would otherwise have floundered.
More choice is an excellent idea: we shouldn't be lumbered with markets in important areas like education and health, where there are limited "one size fits all" options on offer, and especially when the losers from limited choice are towards the bottom of the social and economic ladder.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"

The relevance of the title will become apparent, but first some context.

I've been researching a book, which has largely been on the benefits that increased competition and greater operation of market forces can bring to sectors such as health and education, which tend to use largely non-market methods to commission and distribute their services.

Along the way I've been looking at the literature on new private schools competing with the traditional public system schools - Sweden is often credited with giving this initiative its start, and it has been spreading elsewhere, notably in the UK ('academies') and the US ('charter schools'). And it's reached here, too, with the proposed launch of our version of the idea ('partnership schools').

So I've had to wade into the politicised jungle of quantitative research on how these schools have been performing.

With that as background, here's the news.

For a long time one of the key pieces of evidence on US charter schools was a 2009 study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, a body with the snappy acronym, CREDO. It was a big piece of work - the authors called it "the first time a sufficiently large body of student‐level data has been compiled to create findings that could be considered "national" in scope" (here and later, I'm quoting from the 2009 report's Executive Summary). It covered the learning gains in English and maths of 70% of the total student body then in charter schools, and compared them with demographically matched comparator students ('virtual twins') in the public school system.

One of the headline CREDO results was seized on by opponents and critics of charter schools: overall, 17% of charter schools were better than the public schools, 46% were much the same, but 37% were worse. The differences in actual outcomes were not large, but they were statistically significant. It was a widely quoted result and the study received broad coverage in educational circles everywhere: our own PPTA, for example, had a link on their website directly to it.

There was a range of other interesting findings, too, notably the differences in quality across charter schools ("tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception. The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools and their supporters face") and the fact that charters seemed to do better with students from more difficult backgrounds ("two subgroups fare better in charters than in the traditional system: students in poverty and ELL [English Language Learner] students"). As the report said, though, some charter success with sub-groups shouldn't be allowed to dominate the big picture finding: "greater attention should be paid to the large number of students not being well served in charter schools".

For people (like me) who believe that greater competition and better consumer choice are the first-best path to improved outcomes in many areas, this was, frankly, a disappointing though credible result.
CREDO said at the time that a follow-up research project was in the works, but then they went off the air, and over the years and from a distance I'd rather assumed they'd run into funding or other problems.

Fast forward to June 25 this year: CREDO reappeared with the second, even bigger report covering not just the 16 states of 2009 but another 10 states and New York City (looked at on its own for reasons we needn't bother with here), and using the school records of over 1.5 million charter school students.

Charter schools now outperform the traditional public schools (TPSs), mainly on the English side, with no real difference on the maths side. For English, charters are ahead 25% of the time, the same 56% of the time, and behind 19% of the time. For maths, it's technically a  small win for the TPSs though effectively a draw (charters ahead 29% of the time, behind 31% of the time, 40% no difference).

The 2009 result that charters were doing better with some disadvantaged groups came through again. As the 2013 Executive Summary puts it (p23), "Enrollment and persistence in charter schools is especially helpful for some students, particularly students in poverty, black students, and English language learners all of whom post significantly higher learning gains in both reading and math. Hispanic students are on par with their TPS peers in both reading and math. For students with multiple designations (such as being black and in poverty), the impacts of charter schooling are especially positive and noteworthy".

This, by the way, as I've posted before, is exactly what you'd expect from first principles: the people most likely to benefit from greater choice are those with the least opportunities now.

The report argues that one of the reasons for the better performance of charters is holding them to proper accountability and quality standards (8% of the original 2009 sample have closed), a conclusion I endorse, though I can't say I see the same principle of 'perform or get shut down' being invoked to the same degree to deal with the worst of the US public schools.

In any event, while it's hardly a knock-out win for proponents of greater choice and competition in education, it's a clear improvement on where we were four years ago. On the latest data and analysis, charter schools have a slight edge.

Hence the heading for this post: virtually every man and his dog in the educational establishment were keen to wave the first CREDO report around when it was critical of charters.

What are they doing now?

A thought experiment about charter schools and competition

Charter schools are, obviously, in the news. The latest development is an open letter sent to all MPs arguing against them, and saying, among other things, that they haven't worked overseas.

In future posts I'll come back to the points raised in the letter, and talk about some empirical, real world evidence. But let's just suppose for a moment you knew nothing at all about the practical outcomes of charter schools overseas. Let's go back to first principles for a minute.

Who would you expect to benefit from greater choice in education? Or indeed from greater choice across a wide variety of public services - charter schools are only one example of a strong and growing trend in the developed world towards offering greater choice in areas such as education and health. Self-evidently, you'd expect the people who would benefit most are those who have least choice now.

And who would they be, I wonder?

It's not the well-off: they can, and do, pay for private schooling and private health.

It's not the moderately well-off: they can, and do, change the health or education zones they live in. They aim to buy a house in a good school zone: you'll have seen for yourself that the estate agents signs regularly advertise 'In zone' for a well-regarded local school. And there's nothing unusual in that, by the way - it's internationally well-documented that one of the main effects of zoning-style school allocation is that house prices rise in the better locations.

The main beneficiaries of choice, in short, can only be those who currently have little or no choice at all. And in New Zealand conditions (and in many other countries), that means poorer people in poorer areas.

And it's not like you can escape the poor areas without money. Bright kids in poor areas can't, in general, get scholarships to good private schools elsewhere: that was one of the first things the incoming Labour government of 1999, unforgivably, banged on the head. So poor kids, bright or less bright, are trapped. The only choice they have, at the moment, is the school they're in zone for. It might be an awful sinkhole school, but that's all that is on the menu.

So: a charter school arrives. And your current  local school is dire.

Take a wild punt on the outcome: your current dire school, plus the chance (not the certainty) of a better school, versus your current option, the dire school.

How likely is it that you will be worse off?