What teachers’ unions get wrong about charter schools

“People have now started to see charter schools as: Wow, there are studies that say they are really no better, depending on which charter schools and how selective they are, and they’re not really improving the public schools the way the original concept had hoped,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, said in an interview with NPR.

Prior to that, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in a Huffington Post blog, “A well-regarded Stanford University Study found that charter school students were doing only slightly better in reading than students in traditional public schools, but at the same time doing slightly worse in math.”

But the director of the center that published that study took to Huffington Post to correct Weingarten’s deceptive claims. “Over the course of a school year, charter school students learn more in reading than district public schools — it is as if the charter school students attended about seven more days of school in a typical school year,” wrote Margaret Raymond, Director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. “The learning in math is not statistically different (not worse as [Weingarten] claims).”

Raymond also explained those results only look at students’ first year in a charter. Students who stay longer see remarkable growth. “For students with four or more years in charter schools, their gains equated to an additional 43 days of learning in reading and 50 additional days of learning in math in each year,” she says.

Charter schools are clearly doing better than traditional public schools, contrary to Eskelsen Garcia and Weingarten’s claims.

Furthermore, charter schools are able to save the students that traditional public schools fail the worst: urban low income and minority students. “We found that gains in urban charter schools are dramatic overall (equivalent to 28 days of additional learning in reading and 40 days of additional learning in math every year) but for low income minority students they are nothing short of liberating: as much as 44 extra days of learning in reading and 59 extra days in math,” Raymond says.

Technically, since they are publicly funded, charter schools are still public schools. Eskelsen Garcia says that charters aren’t “really improving the public schools the way the original concept had hoped,” but there is some evidence that public charter schools do actually help traditional public schools, too.

In Washington, D.C., for example, proficiency has improved by 20 percentage points in both charter and traditional public schools in a decade. In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, chalked this up to collaboration between charters and traditional schools. “School leaders from both sectors often work together to improve their practices and to learn from each other.”

Charter schools are publicly funded and do not charge tuition. Compared to traditional public schools, charters have more independence and flexibility in their operations and curricula, which is why so many families find charters desirable. They are open to all students, but they often don’t have enough space to meet demand. In that case, they use a lottery system to determine admission.

Despite all their benefits, teachers’ unions remain one of the few interest groups opposed to charter schools. Instead of attacking charters, maybe the unions should learn to work with them. “If Weingarten and her organization were truly dedicated to the cause of public education,” Raymond says, “they would embrace the thousands of positive examples of charter schools and seek collaboration, partnership and emulation instead of derision.”

Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.