E D U C AT ION EDUC ATI ON
Yes, Charters Raise the Bar Urban charter schools present a vivid success story, and not just for their students. In communities with good charter schools, all students benefit.
By Michael J. Petrilli and David Griffith
T
hirty years ago, when the charter school movement was just getting off the ground, devotees of big-city school systems worried that these new options would drain critical funding, hurt the kids who were left behind, and make a system in which race
played a central but often unacknowledged role even more unjust. Yet, in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that concerns about charterinflicted damage are misplaced—as demonstrated by a pair of new studies that find broad and statistically significant gains for all publicly enrolled students as charter schools expand. If you’re familiar with the research on charter schools, these results shouldn’t be surprising. After all, for the better part of a decade, a steady stream of studies have found that enrolling in urban charters boosts the academic achievement of low-income black and Hispanic students. For example, a 2015 CREDO analysis found that black students in poverty gained almost nine weeks of learning in English and almost twelve weeks in math per year by attending an urban charter school instead of a traditional public school. Michael J. Petrilli is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. David Griffith is associate director of research at the Fordham Institute and author of the Fordham studies Rising Tide and Still Rising. H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2022
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