"New York City's schools show that even in challenging urban environments, excellent education can be delivered with careful policy choices"
Many charter school supporters believe their hour has come. Locally, charters play an increasingly integral part in the school reform agenda of the Los Angeles Unified School District. At the state level, California charters recently received a boost from legislation that permits them access to new bond funding for school construction. And nationally, the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top program includes high-quality charter schools among its priorities.
But an improved outlook for charter schools is not a guaranteed cure-all for bad schools.
A number of studies over the last year have shown that charter schools in California and elsewhere have had mixed results. In 2009, Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which I direct, released the results of a study examining charter school effectiveness in 15 states and the District of Columbia.
We found that, on average, students attending charters did not learn as much as their traditional public school peers. Charter schools, we found, were twice as likely to perform less well than public schools with similar demographics as they were to outperform those public schools.
Many charter school supporters believe their hour has come. Locally, charters play an increasingly integral part in the school reform agenda of the Los Angeles Unified School District. At the state level, California charters recently received a boost from legislation that permits them access to new bond funding for school construction. And nationally, the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top program includes high-quality charter schools among its priorities.
But an improved outlook for charter schools is not a guaranteed cure-all for bad schools.
A number of studies over the last year have shown that charter schools in California and elsewhere have had mixed results. In 2009, Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which I direct, released the results of a study examining charter school effectiveness in 15 states and the District of Columbia.
We found that, on average, students attending charters did not learn as much as their traditional public school peers. Charter schools, we found, were twice as likely to perform less well than public schools with similar demographics as they were to outperform those public schools.