School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [15]
Hoxby and Rockoff found that the charter campuses raised achievement by 5 to 6 points in mathematics and 6 points in reading for students who enrolled in the charter schools in grade five or earlier (too few students enrolled in the later grades to allow similar comparisons). The average student gained 2.5 to 3 extra points for each year at the charter school.
The achievement gains reported by Hoxby and Rockoff are large, equal to nearly half the achievement gap between the disadvantaged minority students and middle-income nonminority students. As Hoxby and Rockoff conclude, “If the students continued to make such gains for each year they spent in charter schools (a big ‘if ’), then the gap between the charter school students and their suburban counterparts would close entirely after about five years of school.”24
Charter Schools in England
The Education Reform Act, adopted in 1988, offers all families in England and Wales the right to attend any government-run school, even if it is outside their tax community or district. School funding follows directly from student enrollment under a comprehensive nationwide school choice program.
Evaluations indicate high parental satisfaction with the program, and schools tend to operate with more autonomy and efficiency as a result of increased market competitiveness. According to Belfield and Levin’s review, “schools are neither more nor less segregated according to ability, race, or socioeconomic status than they were prior to the reforms; and there is no evidence to show that some schools have degenerated substantially.”25
Charter School Effects on Traditional Public Schools
In the State of the Charter Movement 2005, Gregg Vanourek noted wide variations in charter school “market shares” across states even though the enrollment in charter schools was low, about 2 percent of the nation’s pupils.26 This variation allows the study of “ripple” or “competitive” effects on public school systems in districts where charter schools are concentrated. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report concludes that each of the 49 districts in the study “changed the way it conducted its business and/or operations in response to charter schools. In 90 percent of the districts, leaders indicated they made changes in several areas of their district’s operations in response to charter schools.”27
Sixty-one percent of the districts in the GAO report said they changed their educational offerings, and 49 percent began at least one new educational program in traditional public schools. The report concluded that district responses to charter schools tend to evolve over time, and numerous factors affect districts’ reactions to charter school competition, including how district and school leaders perceive charter schools, the “overall ecology of choice in the district,” student performance, district enrollment trends, and whether charter schools generate significant media attention and community awareness.
Caroline Hoxby carried out pioneering research on this topic in 2002 with her analysis of the competitive effects of charter schools on conventional public schools in Michigan and Arizona, where traditional public schools faced losing at least 6 percent of student enrollment to charter schools. Hoxby studied how this competition affects traditional public school achievement. In Michigan, she found that student achievement in traditional public schools made “modest” improvements in response to competition from charter schools. In Arizona, the effect of charter school competition on traditional public school students was “similar to or just a bit larger than the gains made by Michigan public school students.”28 Her analysis of demographic patterns of students enrolled in charter schools compared with traditional public schools in Michigan and Arizona showed that charter schools do not “cream skim or reverse cream skim” in any consistent way. Conventional public schools and charter schools enrolled similar percentages of African-American students in Michigan and similar percentages of Latino