Washington, D.C. charter schools are better at educating students than public schools, according to a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute.
Charter schools help students gain additional days of learning every year in reading, compared to traditional public school students. In math, charter students gain more than half an academic year on their counterparts.
More charter schools than traditional public schools have higher than expected levels of proficiency in math and reading. That measure of expected proficiency took into account students’ income and race.
In the poorest sections of Washington, charter schools dramatically outperform traditional public schools, the report says.
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It’s not that Washington public schools are bad or getting worse, they just aren’t improving as fast as Washington’s charter schools. “Under both models, student performance is improving,” writes David Osborne, director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s project on Reinventing America’s Schools.
Osborne says D.C. public schools are improving because they now have more autonomy than they had in the past, though not as much independence as charter schools. Giving [District of Columbia Public Charter School Board] the power to authorize charter schools could give it an opportunity to turn around failing schools. “Charters excel not because their people are somehow better than those in DCPS,” Osborne writes. “They excel because their governance framework — which includes school autonomy, full parental choice and serious accountability for performance — is superior to the more traditional DCPS approach.”
This gives charter schools an advantage in political flexibility. If the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board wants to close a school, only one school community will resist. Indeed, it closes about five schools a year.
This is a big contrast with what D.C. Public Schools faces in a similar situation. “When DCPS contemplates closing schools and laying off teachers, the entire system pushes back: employees, their unions, parents, and neighborhood activists. Since all those people vote, the mayor feels the pressure,” Osborne writes.
The Progressive Policy Institute describes itself as “the original ‘idea mill’ for President Bill Clinton’s New Democrats.”
