Seldom listed among the nation’s top K–12 performers or its most aggressive reformers, the Ocean State was nevertheless home to a relatively powerful school choice sector. According to the study, students at Rhode Island charters gained the equivalent of 90 extra days of learning in English, and 88 extra days in math, per year.

With the U.S. still groping its way back from massive pandemic-related learning loss, the New England-specific finding generated little focused attention either locally or nationally. But in October, CREDO released that suggests the impressive results may be rooted in the state’s approach to opening and evaluating charters.

Rhode Island’s charter regulations are “instrumental in driving” student success, CREDO argues, pointing to a 2017 overhaul of accountability procedures that simplified the conditions for schools to be rated and renewed. According to interviews with over a dozen key figures from the charter world, the Rhode Island Department of Education, and the governor’s office, the change in law improved relationships between schools and state authorities and reduced uncertainty in how schools were assessed.

“There has been a change from chaotic beginnings to more structured, standardized practices,” said Marzena Sasnal, the lead author of the report and a senior research associate at Stanford. “Participants see this as an improvement.”

Yet the local debate around school choice remains fractious, with charters often seen as competing with districts for students and education funding. Within the last few years, lawmakers considered enacting a moratorium on further charter growth, while leaders of the state’s largest district skeptical of charter expansion.

Justine Oliva, the director of research and policy at the nonpartisan , called the matter of charter schools in the state “contentious,” particularly given in K–12 enrollment since the disruptions of COVID-19.

“With declining enrollment, I do think it’s likely that the issue continues to be a live one, particularly with the proposal for new charters moving forward.”

Charter leaders ‘in the dark’

Rather than directly addressing the often-frayed politics of school choice, or even the inner workings of charters themselves, the CREDO report focuses on the more technical subject of charter school authorization — the process by which new schools are approved, kept open, or, if necessary, shuttered completely.

The state, which legalized charter schools in 1995, established a formal framework for evaluating them 15 years later. But according to the educators and bureaucrats who spoke with Sasnal, the flaws in that review mechanism led to low trust on both sides and a degree of unpredictability when the time came to decide whether schools would be allowed to continue operating. 

With renewal decisions spaced at intervals of five years, charter leaders told CREDO they often felt as though they were acting “in the dark,” without receiving timely feedback on their academic performance or organizational health. Even annual data from standardized tests didn’t give a clear picture of how schools would be judged, some complained.

“The criteria for renewal were so ambiguous and complicated,” said Macke Raymond, CREDO’s director and a co-author of the report. “It didn’t even matter what your state test scores were because you didn’t know what the authorizer’s standards of evaluation were going to be when you came up for renewal.”

The atmosphere was clouded further by political and legal pressure that sometimes developed when regulators made their decisions. When Blackstone Valley Prep, one of the top-performing charter organizations in the state, was greenlit for renewal in 2011, several members of the Rhode Island Board of Education with connections to teachers’ unions . A few years later, three districts the opening of a new school, alleging that community opposition to the move had been ignored.

Following the 2017 reforms to the performance review system, however, CREDO’s interview subjects agreed that the steps to approval and renewal are more legible both to schools and community members. Charter applications are published online, and in communities from which students would likely be drawn. School officials said they had a clearer understanding of the outcomes they would be held responsible for, including both academic performance as well as financial and managerial indicators. One leader said his charter school had been able to identify problem areas early and “put in place a corrective action plan.”

Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University, said the updated framework played “a key role” in stoking improvement in the state charter sector.

“The review system integrates national standards, such as standards established by the , to sharpen the focus on performance-based accountability, data transparency, and quality monitoring.”

Tensions remain

Still, whatever tensions have been alleviated by the revamped system of charter regulations have not dissipated completely.

Elections last year in Providence — by far the largest city and school district in the state — elevated three candidates endorsed by local teachers’ unions to the newly re-established school board; just one charter advocate won election. This summer, the city council appeared poised to permit the Excel Academy charter organization to obtain a lease on a shuttered district school, in the face of public outcry. It was the second year in a row that a version of the deal, brokered by Providence’s mayor, .

The back-and-forth follows a legislative push for a statewide moratorium on new charter growth that stalled in 2021. The state’s governor, Democrat Dan McKee, is a noted supporter of school choice currently seeking reelection. But , and the future direction of policy in the state is unclear. 

Representatives from both of Rhode Island’s major teachers’ unions declined to comment for this story.

Total charter enrollment in the state is comparatively high, with roughly 10 percent of all K–12 students attending a charter school. Even beyond that figure, however, much of the demand from families is unmet: Nearly 30,000 students submitted applications for in the 2023–24 school year. 

RIPEC’s Justine Oliva, pointing to on overall charter enrollment and performance in Rhode Island, called the schools “a bright spot” in the state education mix, overwhelmingly attracting students from disadvantaged communities and delivering significantly better academic results than the school districts they would otherwise attend. Children attending Achievement First charters — currently enrolling over 20 percent of all charter students in the state — were twice as likely to score proficient on state reading exams, and three times as likely on math exams, as those in their sending districts. 

“Not all charters have great outcomes,” Oliva said. “They may still have a lot more applicants than get in, but they don’t all have great outcomes. However, our largest charters have outcomes that outperform the sending districts, as does the charter sector overall.” 

But for certain public schools, funding challenges are nothing new. For the last two decades, our research team at the University of Arkansas has been studying charter school funding in major  cities across the country. Over the summer, we released that found that across 18 cities in 16 states, charter schools receive, on average, 29.5% less funding — $7,147 less per student — than neighboring traditional public schools. This inequity is nothing new.

Our first report, which studied the 2002-03 school year, found a 27% funding gap. Since then, the gap has never been smaller than 20.7%, and it has on a number of occasions been higher than 30%. In other words, students who decide to attend a charter school in one of those cities will, on average, typically sacrifice nearly a third of their funding.

Of course, it’s not just about spending — ultimately, the goal is better outcomes for students. And so, for our , our team combined funding research with data on student achievement so we could see what taxpayers are getting for their money.

The findings were clear: Public charter schools are a great investment. Across nine major cities — Camden, New Jersey; Denver; Houston; Indianapolis; Memphis; New Orleans; New York City; San Antonio, Texas; and Washington, D.C.. — we found that, despite persistent funding gaps, charter schools produced more learning and higher predicted lifetime earnings than traditional public schools per education dollar spent.  

As education leaders make tough financial choices in the coming months, properly funding charter schools should be a no-brainer. After all, if they can achieve these results even with a yawning funding gap, imagine what they could do if they were funded equitably. 

To obtain our findings, we matched our funding research with performance data from the and research findings from the at Stanford University. Notably, this methodology accounts for observable differences between the student populations of charter schools and traditional public schools, including prior academic achievement — and so it is truly an apples-to-apples comparison. 

The results were striking.

In reading, charters average 4.4 NAEP points higher per $1,000 spent than traditional public schools, making charter schools 41% more cost-effective in reading.

 In math, charters average 4.7 points higher per $1,000 funded, making them 43% more cost-effective in math. 

We also examined how attending a charter school instead of a traditional public school would affect lifetime earnings for students. To estimate this, we used wage data from the alongside the aforementioned CREDO study. And once again, charters came out on top. On average, each dollar invested in a student’s schooling in traditional public schools yields $3.94 in lifetime earnings. That same dollar invested in a charter school student yields $6.25 in lifetime earnings — a 58% higher return on investment over the course of a 13-year education. 

What does this mean for education leaders? Despite the political noise, it’s clear that charter schools are a great use of public resources when it comes to what really matters: outcomes for students. As purse strings tighten, leaders should keep that in mind. 

Successful businesses follow a simple practice: They direct more resources toward their more productive units. That’s not what is happening in public education these days. If charters were at least funded equitably, it’s easy to see how they could take their performance to another level, providing even better opportunities for their students.

After several years of mostly negative news coming out of public schools, education leaders should take advantage of this opportunity.

Her announcement last month to leave the position she’s held since 2012 comes as charter schools enter a new era — one marked by dwindling public school enrollment and an explosion of new school choice options. 

 Those who have studied charters see a challenging landscape ahead for the sector, which was born in Minnesota 31 years ago. 

“The coming decade will see an incursion on charters from both the traditional and the new-choice side,” said Macke Raymond, founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. “Nina didn’t have to cope with a double-sided battleground. The next leader will have to.”

Rees, whose family fled Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran when she was 14, was encouraged by Howard Fuller, the Alliance’s founding board chair, to apply for the president and CEO job when the organization launched in 2005. But at the time she was part of the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, working to get another school choice initiative off the ground. 

She was in pushing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship through Congress. The federally funded , which pays tuition at private schools, served about 1,700 low-income students last year, roughly half those who applied. Republicans want to increase funding for the program, while have long wanted to phase it out.

Rees, however, has left her greatest mark in the charter world. 

Rhonda Dillingham, executive director of the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools, called Rees the movement’s “north star.”

Rees hasn’t wavered in her belief that charter schools are public and have a duty to uphold students’ civil rights — an issue that came before the 4^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last year. A North Carolina charter school argued that it should be able to enforce a strict dress code including skirts for girls just because it was run by a nonprofit. 

And Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said Rees and the Alliance have been “hawks” on the issue of low-performing virtual charter schools, calling on authorizers in 2015 to “dramatically improve oversight of their schools, which, in some cases, will mean closing them.” 

As Raymond noted, whoever replaces Rees at the Alliance will face new obstacles. Education savings accounts, which pay for private school tuition and homeschool expenses, have rapidly expanded in multiple states, giving families more options outside of the public education system. And as the North Carolina case, Peltier v. Charter Day School, raised, there’s an ongoing debate over whether charters are public or private under the law. Those who say charters are private argue there should be no limits on religious organizations running schools. The fate of a virtual Catholic charter in Oklahoma, set to open in the fall of 2024, is now tied up in court. 

“The notion of charters being considered private … is something that we will fight,” Rees said in a recent conversation with The 74. 

She’s also persistently fought for increased funding for the federal Charter Schools Program and pushed hard last year against the Biden administration’s efforts to make it more difficult to apply for that money. She argued that the administration didn’t seek input from sector leaders when writing the rules. 

The new regulations call for charters to be more racially balanced and for operators to gain support from traditional schools, which can be difficult when there is competition for students. Organizers also need to avoid opening in neighborhoods where district schools are losing enrollment.

The new rules were also intended to create more transparency when charter funds flow to for-profit companies. They drew support from who argue that the involvement of for-profit businesses in operating charters — especially virtual schools — creates the potential for fraud.

Rees’s leadership of the sector’s principal advocacy organization has coincided with increased quality. CREDO’s most recent report showed students in charters, particularly those in large networks, slightly outperform their peers in traditional schools. 

In the interview, Rees spoke about those findings, the shifting political environment on school choice and her future interest in helping others realize, as she did, opportunity in America. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why leave now?

Nina Rees: With anyone who’s been working in an organization, after 10 years you start to evaluate if you want to stay for another five or 10 or if it’s time to move on. I have accomplished a lot of the things I set out to do. When I came to this organization the Charter Schools Program was only getting $254 million and different charter groups were fighting with one another to capture a portion of that pie. Increasing the pie united the sector and made sure that everyone receives something from the federal grant. The funding is at $440 million. I was hoping it would hit $500 million, but $440 million is a good place to be.

The other goal was to get charters in 50 states — we are now at 46 — and just to stabilize the organization as a hub of information for the sector. I’ve gone through three different administrations, from President Obama to President Trump and now to President Biden. That’s a lot of turmoil, with the pandemic in between. I think it’s time for some fresh thinking. Post-pandemic, we have some huge opportunities to seize because so many families continue to want options. Charter schools have a role to play in meeting that demand.

You’ve seen political support for charters shift dramatically during your tenure with the Alliance. Without the bipartisan base as strong as it once was, did your job become more difficult? 

It was getting difficult to navigate when I came, but I’d like to answer this question differently. In the latest Democrats for Education Reform poll, and every poll that we’ve seen over time, and charter schools in particular. At the top level, there’s not as much discussion around charter schools in a bipartisan way. The education reform debates are no longer as central as they used to be, with the pandemic shifting attention to other priorities. The Democratic and Republican parties are fraying and the opposite ends are getting more airtime, but the reality is that the center still holds. It’s in the center where policy is made. So regardless of the and the , most of what’s happened over the past decades since I’ve been at the federal level , with the support of Democrats like Cory Booker and Michael Bennet and Republicans like Virginia Foxx.

It seems Republicans are more focused on expanding education savings accounts than they are charters. How do you see that playing out at the state level?

We’re monitoring to see how those ESA laws are being implemented. But there was also a lot of momentum around charter schools. Post pandemic, we saw a slew of legislative activity, from to access to facilities to huge improvements in states like Arkansas. Even found a way to allow for charter school expansion. 

ESAs are new and more controversial. They get more media attention, and these other measures, which are amendments to existing laws, are not getting as much airtime. Once the history books are written, people are going to look at these years as pivotal for charters.

And how do you see the growth of ESAs affecting the charter sector? 

In most of these states, it looks like they’re just subsidizing the tuition of private schools students already attend. But in those places where the allocation for the ESA is on par or potentially a little bit higher than what students in charter schools get, that’s where we might want to study and see if there are any shifts. 

One of the biggest charter school stories of the year — and in education in general — has been the Catholic virtual charter school application in Oklahoma. What are your predictions for the debate over religious charter schools? 

Let’s go back to where we were about six months ago when the was pending before the Supreme Court. We were questioning whether that case [which asked whether charters were public or private] would pave the way for religious charter schools. The court chose not to take the case and we’re very pleased with that. For charters to be able to teach religion, you need a proactive statement that deems them private, and that is a point of contention. Everyone who has drafted a charter law and everyone involved in conceptualizing charter schools created these schools in order to create better public schools. 

In school choice circles, we sometimes hear the message that parent satisfaction is the most important measure of success. Do you feel that there’s been a shift away from holding charters accountable for results? Did the pandemic play a part there? 

That’s a great question. I do think we need to take stock of the accomplishments before we pivot to the flaws in the equation. The Macke Raymond of CREDO did the study, we weren’t doing that well. The , it was a little bit better. The of her study definitively demonstrates that the longer our school leaders are in this work, the better they do by the students they’re serving. 

There’s always been debate around whether standards-based accountability and standardized tests get in the way of innovation and potentially harm those types of schools that serve special populations. Over time, state accountability systems have adjusted so they’re not inadvertently discouraging the creation of a credit recovery school or a school that serves a student population that is way behind academically. 

Paying attention to what parents want is very important, and I know that the choice movement is talking a lot more about that. But at the end of the day, the compact with the authorizer is very important. That’s where the rubber hits the road. If charters are not performing well or meeting the terms of their contract, they should be closed.

I don’t know any parents who want to send their child to a school that is not going to graduate them and send them to college.

Along with ESAs, we also see more microschools emerging that are responding to very specific needs and preferences for families. Do you see those models impacting charters?

This is an opportunity for charter schools. When you notice that people have an affinity or an interest in smaller settings that are offering a more customized education, this means charter management organizations can create some of these and see how it works without letting go of all the other things that we need to do as public schools. In the private sector, if there’s an interest to buy certain things, companies start to compete. The charter sector can also create models that are just as attractive but keep the core of what is public about public education. 

Charter enrollment saw a big jump during the pandemic and leveled off a bit last year. How do you think the general decline in public school enrollment we’ve seen nationally is affecting charters?

Our enrollment report is coming out in November, so stay tuned. We’re pretty excited about it. That’s the only thing I can say.

There are two things going on. One is that populations are shifting. This is why we’re so excited about having passed a charter law and the fact that in , you can now open a charter school anywhere around the state. States have made changes that allow charters to open in jurisdictions where populations are shifting. 

People are just dispersing more and that presents a challenge. If you have a model in one community, it’s quicker to scale it and add more students. But if you’re going into these more suburban and rural communities, it’s a little bit more challenging to take this work to scale. For me, it’s going back to the basics; charter schools were always supposed to be about giving local community leaders the tools they need to start something new and different. This opens the door to innovation in ways that are good for the sector. 

You’re not sure what you’re doing next, but what would you like to do?

I love this topic of choice and charters, but I also am fascinated with around the American dream. I’d like something that combines what I’ve done here with adding to the hope and the opportunity of the American dream, with education being one of the key pillars. I like this sector because it invites innovation and big-picture thinkers who are willing to overcome the impossible. Whatever I do next hopefully will continue to be with individuals in service to something that’s transformational.

The report, released Tuesday morning by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, provides perhaps the most thorough perspective available of the landscape of charter schooling, which has grown significantly in recent years.

Macke Raymond, CREDO’s founder and director, said that the report sketched a picture of continuous improvement for the charter sector over the last 15 years. The center’s first national analysis, issued in 2009, showed charters under-performing traditional schools in both core subjects; in a 2013 follow-up, they slightly bested traditional schools in English while still lagging in math. That movement represents a modest silver lining for American education, she said, after a prolonged period during which learning — as measured by standardized tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress — largely stagnated even before the pandemic. 

“When you compare [our findings with] the results of NAEP — which, over an equivalent period, have completely flatlined — what you’re looking at is really the only story in U.S. education policy where we’ve been able to create a set of conditions such that schools actually do get better,” Raymond argued.

The new study focuses on charter school performance in 29 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York City, incorporating standardized test scores between 2015 and 2019. All told, over 80 percent of tested public school students were included in CREDO’s data set. More than 1.8 million charter students were each paired with a “virtual twin” (i.e., a nearby pupil possessing similar demographic traits and prior test scores) enrolled at the district school that the charter student otherwise would have attended.

The research team calculated that charter school students gained the equivalent of an additional 16 days of learning (based on a traditional 180-day school calendar) in English compared with similar kids at district schools. Their six-day edge in math was smaller, though still considered statistically significant.

But even those averages, comprising millions of student measurements across the country, contain significant variation. Black students attending charter schools gained 35 days of growth in reading and 29 days in math — as if they’d attended school for an extra 1.5 months over a single school year. Hispanics enjoyed 30 extra days of reading and 19 in math. By comparison, white and multiracial students lost the equivalent 24 days of annual math learning in charter schools. 

Smaller sub-groups experienced similar divergences. Poor students saw much higher gains in charters than in traditional public schools (23 extra days of reading growth, 17 extra days in math), as did English learners (six extra days of reading, eight in math); students with overlapping designations (such as both African American and low-income, or both Hispanic and English learner), also made considerable strides

By contrast, special education students were seriously stymied, losing 13 days of reading growth and 14 days of math at charter schools relative to kids receiving special education outside of charters. Raymond called that inequity one of the few sore spots revealed by the study, adding that charter schools should be “taken to task” for the collective failure.

“With the exception of very few charter schools that specialize in particular kinds of special education, the sector has basically thrown up their hands and said, ‘This isn’t our job,’” she said.

Even among charters, some types tend to yield better results than others. Specifically, those grouped within a charter management organization (CMO) — a network, either non- or for-profit, that operates multiple schools, such as the well-known KIPP or Success Academy organizations — provide 27 extra days of instruction in reading, and 23 extra days in math, than traditional schools. Stand-alone charters, which encompass roughly two-thirds of all charter schools, generate 10 extra days of reading growth and negative-three days of growth in math.

Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University the impact of charter schools on surrounding public school districts, said that the results of the CREDO report largely dovetailed with those of in New Orleans and elsewhere. He also said that the especially impressive findings from CMO-affiliated schools were somewhat predictable given that many cities and states only consider top-performing charter schools as candidates for replication.

“Some of this is kind of mechanical — not in a bad way, it’s just how the sector operates. If you’re a stand-alone, and you do well, you can open another school,” Harris said. “Then you become a CMO, and they’re better because they were selected to build on their own success. That’s a positive aspect of the charter model.”

Even more distinctive was the dividing line between what might be deemed “traditional” charters and those offering instruction virtually, which had already earned an ugly reputation for low academic quality even before the pandemic began. The popularity of the virtual charter sector has grown substantially since the emergence of COVID — by the Network for Public Education found that fully or mostly online programs enrolled 13 percent of all charter students during the 2020–21 school year — even as they delivered a staggering 124 fewer days of math growth than traditional public schools, along with 58 fewer days of growth in English.

If virtual initiatives were excluded from the national sample, the average charter school advantage would jump from 16 extra days of reading instruction to 21, and from 6 extra days of math instruction to 14. 

Martin West, the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called the report “easily the most comprehensive analysis of charter school performance to date” and echoed concerns about the performance of virtual charter schools.

“The results continue to raise questions about the regulatory environment for virtual charter schools, whose results drag down the overall performance of the broader sector,” West said. “These schools may provide an essential option for students for whom in-person learning truly isn’t possible, but state policymakers should look carefully at who is attending these schools and how well they are being served.”

An additional state-by-state analysis showed that individual jurisdictions have built particularly effective charter school sectors. Across New York State, charter students receive the equivalent of 75 extra days of growth in reading, and 73 extra days in math, compared with demographically similar students at district schools. Massachusetts (41 extra days in both subjects), Maryland (37 extra days in both subjects), Tennessee (34 extra days of reading and 39 in math), and Rhode Island (90 extra days of reading and 88 in math) offered similarly impressive statewide results. Charter school students only experienced significantly weaker reading growth in one state, Oregon.

An additional lesson came with respect to new charter entrants versus existing options. New schools opened by existing CMOs tended to outpace their district competitors, but also to be out-performed themselves by older schools within their own CMO.

“The new schools that have come in since the second study are strong, but they’re not as strong,” Raymond observed. “So it’s not that new schools are coming in and kicking butt and dragging the sector along with them. It’s that, over this period, individual schools around the country are making incremental changes that lead to this trajectory of upward performance.”

How do we know this? from our team at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University looked at learning patterns in 16 states to see how recovery efforts will affect students’ academic careers.

Our partnerships with state education departments provide the means to examine the experience of anonymous individual students as they move through public schools. Their scores on standardized state tests reveal what they know at the end of each school year and how that knowledge changes over time. This level of insight is both wide (covering all tested students in each state) and deep (the data illuminate students’ learning histories).

The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified existing learning disparities. If an average student typically gains a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s time, then those with greater-than-average learning progress more quickly. Conversely, those who do not learn as much as the average student gain less than what’s expected. Reviewing this data over multiple years yields a picture of the Pace of Learning (POL) for individual students.    

The differences in POL are the missing factor in policy decisions about post-COVID efforts.  

Our research assumes that the pre-pandemic pace of learning for individual students is the best that can be expected in the post-COVID years. Using longitudinal student data, we calculated each student’s historical POL and, based on those measures, projected outcomes under different learning loss scenarios. Here, we assume students have lost an average of 90 days of learning due to COVID-19, which has corroborated. We then considered the effects of additional time, measured in extra years of schooling.

The table below shows the percentage of students across the 16 states who would meet the benchmark of average knowledge in reading and math by the end of their senior year in high school.

Without additional learning time, fewer than two-thirds will attain that level in either subject. But more critically, even many years of additional instruction will yield only a small improvement. Even if schools offer an additional five years of education (assuming students would partake), only about 75% of students will hit that 12th-grade benchmark. One-quarter will remain undereducated.

Of course, these estimates are theoretical: No district in the country is capable of extending the years of schooling they offer by these amounts.

These findings reveal a lot about the future students face. Those who will reach the 12th-grade benchmark on time have POLs that are strong enough to keep them on track. They are not the ones to worry about. It is the students with smaller POLs who require the most attention and support. Currently, for every day of instruction, they gain less than a full day of learning. Even a full year of additional schooling may have little impact for them. Programs of shorter duration are even less likely to produce their desired aims.

Current remedies are insufficient to solve the learning gaps for low-POL students. High-dosage tutoring, for example, consists of four to six hours a week of extra learning time. For average learners, that leads to an increase of about eight percentile points on state achievement tests. But because students with low POLs receive less benefit from every hour or day of instruction offered, they will not progress to the same degree as the average student. At the end of a school year, the total number of hours cannot produce the needed for the low-POL population. Moreover, a large number of have found that the benefits from tutoring do not survive into the future for any students. Summer camps offer even less cause for optimism: They provide , and for a shorter time.

Ultimately, the accounting does not add up.

Still, against these discouraging findings, there are promising options for addressing learning recovery. One is to allow students to progress at their own pace toward established benchmarks rather than holding everyone to a fixed timeline of learning. Shifting to a mastery-based approach, rather than maintaining the current system of organizing students by grade level, could achieve this. As long as students continue to progress and demonstrate growth, their schooling could continue. High achievers could reach the benchmarks faster than is usually allowed and move on to more advanced goals. Releasing students from the traditional school year would free up resources that could be devoted to helping lower-POL students.

Another option would be to change the pace of learning only for students with slower rates of progress. Children need higher-quality instruction to realize greater learning gains, and the evidence is clear that the best teachers get than average educators. Making sure each classroom has excellent instruction should be the ultimate goal.

Ways to find and deploy the most successful educators already exist. exist. By utilizing data from professional observations and student test scores, schools could identify the instructors who truly make a difference in their students’ learning and deploy those high-impact teachers in new ways. One approach would be to offer incentives — bonus pay, for example, or credit that could be put toward a sabbatical or other specialized training — to motivate higher-quality teachers to add students to their classes. Offering extra support to teachers who take on extra tasks, such as class aides or release from other duties, could also help. And placing lower-performing students in classes with a high-quality teacher and higher-performing peers can produce a .

In places where the supply of high-need students outstrips the availability of high-impact teachers, an alternative could be to find the best educator in the state for a given subject, who would receive a substantial payment for recording an entire year’s worth of lessons. The videos and all supporting materials — lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, etc. — would be posted online for other teachers to use.  

We call this approach the Instructional Commons. Building on the notion of Massive Open Online Courses, it offers significant benefits: peer-to-peer training, the opportunity for teachers to observe high-quality instruction in depth, a ready resource for their own lesson planning and a common standard for educators and administrators to employ for professional development. If adopted successfully, this approach can elevate the caliber of the existing teacher force at relatively modest cost and without political battles.

The country is at a pivotal moment in K-12 public education. It is time to decide whether we are willing to make the necessary changes to the current system for our students’ future. This will require deep alterations to the existing organization and practice of K-12 public education. The alternative: continued support of an institutional system that will almost certainly fail. 

Disclosure: Margaret (Macke) Raymond is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which provides financial support to The 74.

The by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, focuses on pre-pandemic performance, looking at the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years.

Compared to an average student in the state, students in San Antonio overall showed weaker learning gains in reading, but similar gains in math during that time. 

The study found that in 2017-18, charter school students received the equivalent of 10 more days of instruction in reading, but five fewer days of instruction in math, compared to their peers elsewhere in Texas. 

The following year, however, charter school students outshone others, getting the equivalent of 51 more days of instruction in reading and 46 in math, compared to peers statewide. 

“Charter performance seems to show (an) increasing upward trend” over the two years of the study, said researcher Won Lee. He noted that, as far back as 2014, data shows consistent growth for San Antonio charter schools, in both reading and math. “So that’s encouraging, I think.”

Brian Whitley, spokesman for the Texas Charter Schools Association, attributed a portion of the performance boost to the diversity of educational opportunities offered by San Antonio charters, such as schools focused on STEM, classical education and rich liberal arts curricula. He also attributed some of the performance gains to charters’ longevity in the state, where the first charter law went into effect in 1995.

As a result, he said, “charter schools get increasingly good at zeroing in on what different kinds of students need, and refining their curriculum, refining their instructional methods.” 

The district did not respond to several requests for comment on the new findings, but Nora J. Walsh, who leads the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, welcomed them: “As a foundation committed to supporting charter schools throughout San Antonio,” she wrote in an email, “we were thrilled to see that the data in this study supports what we knew to be true, that charter schools offer a valuable option for students and their families looking for an education beyond the one designated by their zip code.”

A nationwide look at school performance

The new study is part of an ongoing CREDO series examining school performance , first published in 2019. Since then, CREDO has taken on examinations of achievement in another five cities.

Lee said it’s difficult to generalize overall charter performance from the San Antonio findings, due to heterogeneity of schools and students, among other issues, across the 11 cities. But he noted that CREDO is working on a that covers 25 states and may be able to zero in on the overall effect of charter schools on achievement when it’s published early next year. 

As in several other cities, CREDO researchers in San Antonio examined achievement in so-called Innovation Schools, district-managed public schools with strategic plans that allow waivers to specific district policies, state statutes, and collective bargaining agreements. These schools were introduced in the city in the 2018-19 school year, so researchers had no data for them from 2017-18.

Lee likened these schools to open-enrollment charter schools that are also accessible to students outside of the district. Priority admission, however, is given to students within district boundaries. 

The data suggest that the sector has shown a few growing pains: Students in San Antonio Innovation Schools in 2018-19 showed weaker growth in reading than the state average, but similar growth in math. 

The researchers found that Innovation Schools students receiving the equivalent of six fewer days of instruction in reading and 13 fewer days in math, compared to peers statewide. 

Progress across demographic groups

Whitley, of the charter schools association, said San Antonio has seen heavy growth in the charter sector over the past few years. In the last school year, he said, the city’s metro area, which comprises several districts, boasted about 48,800 students, or just under 11 percent, enrolled in charters.

Between the 2018-19 and the 2021-22 school years, Whitley said, charter enrollment rose by about 11,000 students, or nearly 30 percent. 

He said about two-thirds of charter schools in the metro area had a wait list. Statewide, there are about 58,000 students on Texas charter school waitlists, he noted. 

He said San Antonio is also representative of large cities nationwide in terms of student demographics: Charters there enroll a larger share of students of color, low-income students and English language learners than traditional district schools. 

And these students are making some of the most noticeable gains, the CREDO data show: Black students in San Antonio charter schools got the equivalent of 42 more days of instruction in reading and 73 in math compared statewide. 

Likewise with Hispanic charter school students, who showed benefits equaling 49 extra days of instruction in reading and 36 in math. Students in poverty had similar findings: Low-income charter school students got the equivalent of 56 more days in reading and 48 more days in math.

Whitley noted that the new results are similar to CREDO results that researchers found over the past few years in Houston and Austin. “They’re all sort of showing the same thing when it comes to charter school students achieving all these additional days of learning, especially …traditionally disadvantaged student subgroups.”

What’s perhaps most notable: Charter schools offered eye-popping advantages for English language learners. In reading, these students received the equivalent of 95 extra days, more than half the typical school year.

For disabled students, the findings on charter schools were similarly promising, with charter students received the equivalent of 87 extra days in reading and 68 in math. Innovation School students actually received the equivalent of 16 fewer days in reading, but 55 more days in math. 

, president & CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, welcomed the results, saying the gains are due to “the flexibility and autonomy offered by public charter schools. The charter school model empowers teachers to provide innovative, high-quality instruction and gives them the autonomy to design a classroom that fits their students’ needs.” 

Rees noted charters’ strong philanthropic support in San Antonio, adding, “Charter schools are led by dynamic individuals who have the flexibility to create a school culture that responds to the needs of the community and fosters student performance and parent satisfaction.”

, released by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), focused on pre-pandemic performance, looking at the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years.

It found that in the 2018-2019 school year, charter school students learned the equivalent of 64 more days of instruction in reading and 116 days in math, compared to their district school peers. Black charter school students had even bigger gains, with 86 more days in reading and 144 days in math relative to Black students in district schools. 

In a statement, Indianapolis Superintendent said the study “provides another piece of critical data in our relentless mission for all schools to be better.”

The findings reinforce the district’s belief that diving into data about academic performance at all schools helps educators “build on what works, and fix where we aren’t delivering for students,” she said.

The findings showed that Black charter school students in Indianapolis had more growth in math than the average Black student statewide; they showed similar growth in reading. Similarly, Black students in Innovation Network Schools saw growth on par with peers statewide. are a group of 20 public schools in the city that enjoy complete, charter-like autonomy over academics and operations. While seven are actually charter schools, the remaining 13 are either new schools, strong district schools whose staffs are trying something new, or struggling schools that have been “restarted” with outside partners.

But Black students in traditional district schools performed worse than the typical Indiana student in both reading and math.

The new study, part of an ongoing CREDO series examining school performance in 10 cities, follows a 2019 study finding that growth in both reading and math was weaker than state averages in 2015-16 and 2016-17.

When researchers compared student performance citywide for the current study, they found that students at charters and Innovation Network Schools outperformed district peers across subgroups: Black charter school students saw stronger growth than district students in both reading and math, and Hispanic students in charter schools and Innovation Network Schools showed similar gains.

So did low-income students at charter schools. Similarly, English Language Learners in city charter and Innovation Network Schools saw better gains than district students.

Brandon Brown, CEO of , an Indianapolis nonprofit that has launched 41 schools, said one key to the charter sector’s success in the city is that the vast majority are locally grown, with leaders “who know Indianapolis.” Most of those leaders, he said, are also people of color who directly reflect the racial backgrounds of students. 

The sector’s performance is “a direct result of schools that are created and sustained relative to what our community wants and needs. And I do think that that’s pretty unique, when you look across much of the work that’s happening nationally.”

Brown also noted that local officials look favorably upon charters – the mayor’s office is the largest authorizer in the city – and don’t see their growth as “a zero sum game.”

“There’s nowhere in the country where the school district and charters work as closely together,” he said. 

Darius Sawyers, principal of Paramount Englewood, a 5th-8^th-grade school that’s part of the Paramount Schools of Excellence network, said the sector’s small scale allows him to collaborate regularly with other charter leaders, in a kind of ongoing principals’ consultancy. “We’re talking best practices, we’re talking data, we’re talking, ‘What are you doing to move the data or move the needle?’”

He said being part of a local network has advantages. “Everybody’s right here,” he said. “If not in the same building, a block or two away.”

Austin Hauser, director of Academic Accountability at Herron High School, said his small network of three Herron Classical Schools is “absolutely homegrown,” founded by a local teacher with more than 30 years of experience. “It was started really as a neighborhood movement.”

Being homegrown, he said, allows teachers and administrators “to focus on exactly what we need in our community …. We’re not worried about who we should be in Chicago or in Cincinnati or wherever the network may be located. We are in Indianapolis.”

The paper was released this morning by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), a research organization at Stanford University that examines education reform and school effectiveness. Its prior releases have often shown the academic performance of charter schools comparing favorably against traditional public schools.

In a call with reporters, Macke Raymond, CREDO’s director and a distinguished senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, called the findings “a remarkable case study of what happens when schools are in this kind of operating framework.” 

“It makes me wonder what would happen if we gave that opportunity to other public schools,” Raymond added.

The study is a continuation of that focused exclusively on remote learning in New York charter schools during the first few months of the pandemic. In this paper, survey data from New York charters was combined with that of two other states, California and Washington State. In all, CREDO sent questionnaires to over 1,700 charters in all three states; they received 524 responses from schools enrolling roughly 225,000 students. All of Washington’s 13 charter schools responded to the survey, while 21 percent of California’s and 64 percent of New York’s did the same.

The polling delved into the specifics of each school’s reaction to the emergence of COVID-19 and resultant switch to remote learning, first between March and June of 2020, then during the 2020-21 school year. The questions touched on how long it took for schools to complete that switch, how they altered instruction, how learning modes changed over time, and what kind of training they provided to employees during the pandemic’s first year.

At that time, charter leaders reported focusing overwhelmingly on how to keep delivering instruction and maintaining contact with families. Measuring priorities among respondents, the study showed that 86 percent listed the transition to digital learning as “very urgent”; 81 percent said that establishing connections with families was very urgent, and 78 percent said the same of maintaining student engagement. By comparison, a smaller group characterized the provision of meals (55 percent), developing protocols for positive cases (37 percent), or ensuring student housing (35 percent) as very urgent.

The drive to move online was reflected in the speed with which charter schools got up and running after state-mandated closures began. On average, charter leaders reported an interval of just 3.5 days between closing their physical campuses and reopening for online instruction. California charters took an average of four days to manage this transition, while those in Washington said they accomplished it in just two. By contrast, held that less than 40 percent of teachers in district schools were in daily contact with their students by the end of that March.

The relatively shorter transition time for charters was previously noted in a July 2020 report from Tulane University’s National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. The slight lag displayed by traditional public schools was one the few differences between traditional public, private, and charter schools in that research. 

Raymond described the swiftness of charters as “amazingly different” than what was occurring in district schools at the same time. “What we’re looking at here is literally hundreds of schools all doing the same thing,” she said. “They’re all getting a plan, getting into motion, and doing it quickly.”

Charters responding to the CREDO survey also reported moving gradually to a hybrid learning model throughout the 2021 school year. While roughly 80 percent of respondents said they were operating in fully remote status in April 2020, only about 50 percent were still fully remote by February 2021. The other half had moved to a hybrid model by that time.

Somewhat disturbingly, a sizable number of survey participants said they were forced to change academic classes during the initial months of the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, 12 percent said they had dropped courses entirely, but that number jumped to 22 percent during the following school year. During 2020-21, 18 percent of respondents said they had altered high school graduation requirements, 40 percent said they had modified promotion requirements between grades, and 55 percent said they had reduced course content overall.

Changes to academic content also made their impact on learning time. Some 60 percent of charter leaders surveyed said they had reduced the length of their school day relative to the year that preceded the pandemic. Around 15 percent reported extending the school days, while over 30 percent said they had made “other calendar changes,” including moving back the start of the school year, shortening vacations, or moving to a year-round schedule.

With few exceptions, charters additionally offered help to their teachers while negotiating the sudden switch to Zoom classrooms. In total, 97 percent of survey participants reportedly provided professional development to staff related explicitly to online learning, the report found. By comparison, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that most district reopening plans for the 2020-21 school year made no public commitment to increasing time for professional development.

This freedom to tinker with the structure and delivery of academic content was attributable to what Raymond described as the fundamental nature of the “charter bargain”: Schools of choice are afforded more flexibility than their more traditional counterparts, and so are continually adapting throughout their existence. Once the pandemic began, she argued, they were amply prepared to roll with its uncertainties.

“When we kept pulling back from the data and seeing the patterns, what appears so surprising to us is that across different political contexts, different authorizing environments, different financial situations, what you have here is this practically universal response from the charter schools: Extremely fast, extremely focused on maintaining instruction, making tough trade-offs, mobilizing networks, getting all hands on deck as quickly as possible.”