The opponents of school choice and charter schools sometimes argue that private schools don’t deliver better education. Usually, though, they contend that if parents can send their children to a better school, the children left behind in the inferior school will suffer.
A new study suggests that the students “left behind” benefit from charter schools they don’t attend because the charter schools apply competitive pressure to the traditional public schools.
Economists David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik, together with education scholar Cassandra Hart, gathered data from 12 “large and diverse” school districts in Florida, which has had charter schools since 1996.
The researchers merged student data with birth records that allowed them to include socioeconomic factors — are the parents college educated? Rich? Poor? — into their assessment.
If a public school was surrounded by more charter schools with more slots, then it seemed to improve a bit. That is, in public schools facing competition, reading scores and attendance improved compared to what otherwise would be expected. The improvement was not massive, and it didn’t show up in math, but it was measurable.
Even a modest improvement in public schools competing with charter schools undermines that “left behind” argument against charter schools.
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A study in 2020 by Marcus Winters found similar results: “There is no distinguishable relationship between the percentage of students within a district who were enrolled in a charter school in 2009 and changes in the test scores of students enrolled in traditional public schools between then and 2016. Indeed, if a relationship exists but was too subtle for my model to detect, it is more likely that districts with high charter school concentrations made larger-than-expected gains over this period.”
Imagine that — competition makes things better.
