Charter schools increase college enrollment, despite mixed test scores: A closer look at the benefits of school choice
August 5, 2024
It’s possible to wonder why we’re all so much in favor of school choice. You know, other than the idea that we are just hateful and want to gut the public school system. At this point, some research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER:
The charter school movement encompasses many school models. In Massachusetts in the 2010s, the site of our study, urban charter schools primarily used “No Excuses” practices, whereas nonurban charters had greater model variety. Using randomized admissions lotteries, we estimate the impact of charter schools by locality on college preparation, enrollment, and graduation. Urban charter schools boost all of these outcomes. Nonurban charter schools raise college enrollment and graduation despite reducing state test scores and AP enrollment.
It is possible to read that and think, well, lower AP enrollment – and think that charters and school choice are good sometimes and bad others. Therefore, we should only sometimes allow school choice.
But that misunderstands the findings of the research.
Study: Charters Boost College-Going — Even When Test Scores Fall. A review of charter schools in Massachusetts finds important differences between those located inside and outside of cities.
That’s to get much closer to the real point.
What is it that we want from the schooling of children? That each child gains the best possibility to succeed in this life, obviously.
We’re ultimately not interested in test scores or AP placements; they’re proxies. Things that we can take as being targets, guides, but they’re not the thing itself. One of the problems with centrally directed bureaucracies – like school districts – is that they concentrate upon the easily measured proxies, the targets, not the actual goal. This is the start of all those jokes about Soviet tractor production statistics.
So, what happens when each school decides upon its own its own method of at least attempting to reach the actual goal – that best chance for the kids – rather than the tractor production numbers?
Well, here we are, here’s the result. When local folks, working locally, do the best they can for the local kids, results improve by the real measure we’re actually interested in.
We’re in favor of school choice because it works. Sure, it’s possible to have different goals – the maintenance of the bureaucracy perhaps, political correctness even – but we can’t, really, bring ourselves to think that a change to the public school system that improves the education of kids is a bad idea.