National charter school study

This American study provides an update to the 2009 landmark 16-state study ‘Multiple Choice’, the first study to take a comprehensive look at the impact of charter schools on pupil performance. The 2009 study found a wide variance in quality among charter schools, with pupils in charter schools not doing as well in the aggregate as those attending traditional public schools.

The current study looks at the performance of pupils in charter schools in 26 states. It found that in those states charter school pupils now had greater learning gains in reading than their peers in traditional public schools, while traditional public schools and charter schools had equivalent learning gains in mathematics.

In the aggregate, charter school pupils in the 26 states in the new study gained an additional eight days of learning each year in reading beyond their peers in traditional public schools. In 2009 they had lost seven days each year in reading and 22 fewer days in mathematics. This apparent improvement was caused in part by the closure of 8% of charter schools in the original 16 states in the intervening years as well as declining performance in the traditional public schools over the same period.