Unlike Their Neighbors: Charter School Student Composition Across States
Executive Summary
The national debate over charter schools has been fueled by two competing narratives about the kinds of students charters serve. Opponents claim charters unfairly select the most advantaged students, draining resources from traditional public schools and avoiding accountability. Proponents paint a different picture, claiming many charters purposefully serve the most disadvantaged students who have languished in failing public schools. Both characterizations have some merit, but neither accurately describes charter schools writ large. As cataloged in a previous report, Differences on Balance, charter schools nationwide display a variety of balanced differences in student composition, compared with their neighboring public schools.However, charters are governed by the states, and some states’ charter schools display a much less balanced set of differences. In some states, charter schools look much more like their opponents’ characterizations, serving far fewer historically disadvantaged students than their neighbors. Other states have charter sectors that look like charter proponents often suggest, serving more disadvantaged students.
Several states are on the extremes of this spectrum, but most fall somewhere in between, reflecting the diversity of not only charter schools but also charter sectors across states. These individual reports profile each state’s charter sector to promote a more nuanced national portrait of charters and a more informed discussion of state charter policy.
Report
National debate over charter schools has hit a fevered pitch this year. Teachers unions and many classical Democrats have opposed charters—with this wing successfully stiffening anti-charter language in the Democratic National Committee’s official platform. Even more extreme, the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives Matter called for a complete national moratorium on charter schools.1However, the charter debate does not cleave along a simple left/right divide. While those on the right tend to support charters, groups on the left fall on both sides of the issue. Teachers unions, traditional Democrats, and some civil rights organizations oppose them, but President Barack Obama and many civil rights organizations have been strong charter supporters. Other groups, including the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), and hundreds of civil rights leaders2, have specifically dismissed calls for a moratorium, with BAEO President Jacqueline Cooper calling the NAACP resolution "ill-conceived and based on lies and distortions about the work of charter schools.3
The divide is rooted in two competing narratives about what charters are and what students they serve. Opponents paint charter schools as "public-private" schools run by independent groups that seek to profit from public funds without accountability and that use various means to select the most advantaged students for their schools.4 Hillary Clinton illustrated that view last year when she said, "Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them."5
Supporters paint a very different picture. They tend to think of charters as hope-filled alternatives for historically disadvantaged students who have long been failed by traditional public schools (TPSs). As Shavar Jefferies of DFER argued, "In communities of color throughout our country, public charter schools are providing pathways to college and careers that previously were not available."6
A national conversation begs for a simple idea of what charters are and who they serve, and these two narratives are competing to define that idea. That competition has thrived in part because of limited evidence on charter student selectivity. Some evidence has had a national scope but used faulty comparisons between all charters and all TPSs. This is problematic because it ignores the fact that most TPS students have no charter choices. Other studies have used more nuanced methods but in small areas, which means that the results do not generalize to all charters.
States with data are highlighted on the map below. Clicking on the state will bring you to the individual report.
I tried to bridge this divide in a recent report that compared the student composition of charter schools to that of the TPSs that neighbor them.7 This approach affords a viable look at student selectivity in all brick-and-mortar charters nationwide by removing the majority of TPSs—whose students do not have viable access to charter options—from the comparisons. By examining how often, how much, and in what directions charter schools’ students differed from those in neighboring TPSs, I found that, nationally, charters frequently differ from neighboring TPSs on many characteristics, but not in uniform ways.
Student poverty is a perfect example. Charters are often assumed to serve more poor students than TPSs. Compared to their neighboring TPSs, many charters do serve substantially more poor students; however, just as many serve fewer poor students, and both groups differ by comparable amounts.
Clarifying these national differences between charters and TPSs is worthwhile for a national debate. However, that clarity may be even more important at the state and local levels, where charter policies are articulated. Across the nation, charters differ from both their neighboring TPSs and other charter schools. Some of those differences are balanced nationally, but that is not the case in all states. Looking across states can also show how the charter sectors in one state can look very different from another.
In addition, charter schools are accountable to state and local authorizers, which granted their charters and can take them away. Clear evidence on how charter schools differ from their neighboring TPSs in a given state are vitally important when high-stakes decisions are being made, such as the upcoming voter referendum in Massachusetts that will decide whether the state cap on charter schools will be lifted.
This report provides that state-specific context. It compares charter and neighboring TPSs at the state level, using the same methods as the national report. The first section provides a brief summary of the methods used to identify neighboring TPSs and compare them to charter student populations and explains how to interpret the findings. The next section contains reports for each state that had at least 50 charter schools that could be matched to five neighboring TPSs.
