Do you ever wonder about charter schools? You are not alone! Here at OEP we appreciate Arkansas’s charter schools for the opportunity they offer for students who may not feel the ‘right fit’ at their traditional public school. Today we release a report on how the academic value-added growth and achievement of students attending an open-enrollment charter schools in the state compares to that of students attending a traditional public school. The full report is available here, but we’ll hit the highlights in today’s blog.
First, we want to clarify that charter schools are public schools. Parents do not pay tuition, and charter schools are held to the same accountability metrics as traditional public schools. Charter schools are responsible for the implementing all special education services as written in the Individualized Education Program (IEP). Children with disabilities who attend public charter schools, and their parents, retain all rights under the IDEA.
In Arkansas, there are two types of public charter schools: open-enrollment charters and district conversion charters. The key difference is that open-enrollment charters can draw students from anywhere, while district conversion charters can only draw students from within the school district’s boundaries. If more students want to attend an open-enrollment charter than there are spots available, the school must hold a public lottery to identify accepted students.
For the purposes of this research, we focus on open-enrollment charter schools, because parents and their students make the choice to attend a school outside of their traditional public school attendance zone. We consider district conversion charters with traditional public schools due to the attendance limitation. Our research focused on schools serving typical populations of students through a face-to-face instructional model. As a result, twenty traditional public schools and sixteen open-enrollment charter schools were excluded from the analyses.
Statewide, 94% of public school students attend a traditional public school, and 6% attend an open-enrollment charter school.
To see how the students in charters and traditional public schools were performing, we used publicly available school-level data from myschoolinfo to examine the last three years of student performance in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics based on the annual required assessments for students in grades 3-10. We use weighted averages to account for variations in school size in analyzing academic value-added growth and achievement. Value-added growth represents how much a student improved their score on state assessments compared to other students across the state who had similar prior test score histories. Weighted achievement represents how well students performed on the annual assessment. To facilitate interpretation of the results, we translated the scores of the open-enrollment charter group and the traditional public school group into statewide percentile ranks within year and outcome. The percentile rank allows for an understanding of how students in each group were performing compared to all individual schools across the state.
Overall, students attending Arkansas’s open-enrollment charter schools are growing their learning and achieving at higher rates than their peers in traditional public schools.
The results of this descriptive analysis reveal that statewide, students attending open-enrollment charter schools are consistently demonstrating greater value-added academic growth and achievement than their peers in traditional public schools.
Regional analyses for schools in Central Arkansas and Northwest Arkansas also reflect students attending open-enrollment charter schools consistently demonstrating greater value-added growth and achievement than their peers in traditional public schools. In the Delta region, students attending open-enrollment charter schools are consistently demonstrating greater value-added growth, although their achievement is slightly lower than that of students attending traditional public schools in the region.
Among schools serving the highest populations of students facing economic disadvantages (over 87% FRL), students attending open-enrollment charter schools demonstrate greater growth, but somewhat lower achievement than students in traditional public schools. Among schools serving the lowest populations of students facing economic disadvantages (under 34% FRL), students attending open-enrollment charter schools demonstrate greater value-added academic growth and achievement than students in traditional public schools.
There are, of course, traditional public schools where student performance is above the average performance of open-enrollment charters, and charters where student performance is below the average performance of traditional public schools. But it is good to know that, on average, students who choose to attend an open-enrollment charter school are demonstrating strong academic growth and achievement.