Fifteen years ago, lawmakers in Massachusetts sponsored a bold experiment designed to answer this question: If public schools were granted more autonomy to staff their own classrooms, choose their own curricula and manage their own budgets, could they deliver improved student achievement? The first Charter School opened in Boston shortly after the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act in 1993. In 1995, the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teacher’s Union responded by creating their own version of the autonomous school model, known as the “Pilot School.” Since then, enrollment has grown rapidly in both types of autonomous schools. Although Pilots and Charters are increasingly popular with students and parents, there is still no consensus on whether they are producing better results and the debate has intensified recently. In this report, the authors take two different approaches to resolving the doubts surrounding the impacts of Charter and Pilot Schools. First, they use newly-available data from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ data system to follow individual students over time, and use those data to control for each student’s achievement, demographics, and program participation prior to attending a Charter or Pilot School. In a second approach, they use the fact that the school assignment process is based on lotteries. This research design compares the outcomes of those who were offered a slot in a Charter or Pilot school to those who applied to the same schools and were not offered a slot. Whether using the randomized lotteries or statistical controls for measured background characteristics, the authors generally find large positive effects for Charter Schools, at both the middle school and high school levels. Among key findings of the report: the impact of charter schools was particularly dramatic in middle school math. The effect of a single year spent in a charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achievement gap. Performance in English Language Arts also significantly increased for charter middle school students, though less dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger performance scores in high school, in English Language Arts, math, writing topic development, and writing composition. Students in pilot high schools also made measurable progress.
Fifteen years ago, lawmakers in Massachusetts sponsored a bold experiment designed to answer this question: If public schools were granted more autonomy to staff their own classrooms, choose their own curricula and manage their own budgets, could they deliver improved student achievement? The first Charter School opened in Boston shortly after the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act in 1993. In 1995, the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teacher’s Union responded by creating their own version of the autonomous school model, known as the “Pilot School.” Since then, enrollment has grown rapidly in both types of autonomous schools. Although Pilots and Charters are increasingly popular with students and parents, there is still no consensus on whether they are producing better results and the debate has intensified recently.
In this report, the authors take two different approaches to resolving the doubts surrounding the impacts of Charter and Pilot Schools. First, they use newly-available data from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ data system to follow individual students over time, and use those data to control for each student’s achievement, demographics, and program participation prior to attending a Charter or Pilot School. In a second approach, they use the fact that the school assignment process is based on lotteries. This research design compares the outcomes of those who were offered a slot in a Charter or Pilot school to those who applied to the same schools and were not offered a slot.
Whether using the randomized lotteries or statistical controls for measured background characteristics, the authors generally find large positive effects for Charter Schools, at both the middle school and high school levels. Among key findings of the report: the impact of charter schools was particularly dramatic in middle school math. The effect of a single year spent in a charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achievement gap. Performance in English Language Arts also significantly increased for charter middle school students, though less dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger performance scores in high school, in English Language Arts, math, writing topic development, and writing composition. Students in pilot high schools also made measurable progress.
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