Charter Students Outperform Their Traditional Public School Peers
Lindsey Burke /
Students who entered and won a lottery to attend a charter school in New York outperformed their peers who entered the lottery but did not win a spot and instead enrolled in a traditional public school. According to new research by Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby, which is highlighted today in both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, students attending charter schools in New York outperform their peers who remained in traditional public schools in math and reading.
New York Charter school students, which typically come from disadvantaged families, scored nearly as well as students enrolled in the affluent Scarsdale school district. According to the study:
On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.