U.S. News and World Report, August 16, 2016: (Opinion) A Different Kind of Charter Diversity

“In a new report released Tuesday, I attempt to bridge the tradeoffs in scope and rigor by comparing student populations in charters across the nation to the public schools that neighbor them. Specifically, I match all brick and mortar charter schools to the nearest 5 traditional public schools of the same grade level in the same jurisdiction. The results show that which traditional public schools you compare charters to matters a lot. The figure below shows student poverty for all traditional public schools, charter schools and the subset of the former that neighbor charter schools. While poverty in charter schools differs dramatically from all traditional public schools, those differences largely disappear when charters are compared only to their neighboring schools. Similar patterns are evident for average student minority concentration and suspension rates, but not for average special education and limited English proficient student percentages.”