The Hechinger Report – Jill Barshay
“Are charter schools (taxpayer funded but privately operated) better at educating kids than traditional public schools? It’s a vexing question. Some charter school chains, such as Success Academy in New York City, boast impressively high test scores. But it’s unclear if high-achieving children from devoted families would have done just as well in their neighborhood schools. The research shows mixed results. Five years ago, one group of researchers found that charter school students across Chicago and the whole state of Florida scored slightly worse on math tests than their public high school counterparts. Their reading scores were about the same. But last week, the same group of researchers produced a follow-up study on the Florida students, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and it showed something startling: the charter students might not have produced higher test scores when they were in school, but years later, when they were in their mid-twenties, the charter school students earned more money, and were more likely to have attended at least two years of college (although still only half of them did so).”(more)