Groundbreaking Charter School Research

There isn't a lot of rigorous scientific research in education.  A big problem is an inability to conduct truly randomized studies; another problem is that ed schools don't really train teachers in scientific research and statistical analysis.  So when stuff like this comes around it deserves our attention.  A Harvard Education Professor teamed up with an MIT Economics professor to come up with one of the better studies I've seen.

Key findings below:

For elementary Pilot School students, a significant impact was seen in English Language Arts scores, but not for math scores.  In middle school, the observational results suggest Pilot School students may actually lose ground when compared to their peers in traditional schools, while the lottery-based results showed no difference between Pilot School and traditional school performance. At the high school level, observational results showed significant improvement of performance by both charter and pilot school students, compared to student performance in traditional schools. The lottery-based study, however, showed no significant difference between high school students in Pilot School and high school students in traditional schools.

Among other key findings of the report: the impact of charter schools was particularly dramatic in middle school math. The effect of a single year spent in a charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achievement gap. Performance in English Language Arts also significantly increased for charter middle school students, though less dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger performance scores in high school, in English Language Arts, math, writing topic development, and writing composition.  Students in pilot high schools also made measurable progress.