NHEG EDGuide December 2016

Unlike Their Neighbors:

Unlike Their Neighbors: Charter School Student Composition Across States BY NAT MALKUS (Continued from previous page) Hillary Clinton illustrated that view last year when she said, "Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them." 5 Supporters paint a very different picture. They tend to think of charters as hope-filled alternatives for historically disadvantaged students who have long been failed by traditional public schools (TPSs). As Shavar Jefferies of DFER argued, "In communities of color throughout our country, public charter schools are pro-viding pathways to college and careers that previously were not available." 6 A national conversation begs for a simple idea of what charters are and who they serve, and these two narra-tives are competing to define that idea. That competition has thrived in part because of limited evidence on charter student selectivity. Some evidence has had a national scope but used faulty comparisons between all charters and all TPSs. This is problematic because it ignores the fact that most TPS students have no charter choices. Other studies have used more nuanced methods but in small areas, which means that the results do not generalize to all charters. I tried to bridge this divide in a recent report that compared the student composition of charter schools to that of the TPSs that neighbor them. 7 This approach affords a viable look at student selectivity in all brickand-mortar charters nationwide by removing the majority of TPSs whose students do not have viable access to charter options from the comparisons. By examin-ing how often, how much, and in what directions char-ter schools’ students differed from those in neighboring TPSs, I found that, nationally, charters frequently differ from neighboring TPSs on many characteristics, but not in uniform ways. Student poverty is a perfect example. Charters are often assumed to serve more poor students than TPSs. Compared to their neighboring TPSs, many charters do serve substantially more poor students; however, just as many serve fewer poor students, and both groups differ by comparable amounts. Clarifying these national differences between char-ters and TPSs is worthwhile for a national debate. How -ever, that clarity may be even more important at the state and local levels, where charter policies are articu-lated. Across the nation, charters differ from both their neighboring TPSs and other charter schools. Some of those differences are balanced nationally, but that is not the case in all states. Looking across states can also show how the charter sectors in one state can look very different from another. In addition, charter schools are accountable to state and local authorizers, which granted their charters and can take them away. Clear evidence on how charter schools differ from their neighboring TPSs in a given state are vitally important when high-stakes decisions are being made, such as the upcoming voter referendum in Massachusetts that will decide whether the state cap on charter schools will be lifted. This report provides that state-specific context. It compares charter and neighboring TPSs at the state level, using the same methods as the national report. The first section provides a brief summary of the methods used to identify neighboring TPSs and compare them to charter student populations and explains how to inter-pret the findings. The next section contains reports for each state that had at least 50 charter schools that could be matched to five neighboring TPSs. (Continued next page) 22

Unlike Their Neighbors: Charter School Student Composition Across States BY NAT MALKUS (Continued from previous page) Data and Methods The primary data for this report came from the 2011–12 Common Core of Data (CCD) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which includes infor-mation on school type, location, and the percentage of students by race and eligibility for reduced-price meals for every school in the nation. 8 Data from the 2011–12 Civil Rights Data Collection from the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights supplied percent-ages of students with disabilities and students who were English language learners, as well as data on out-of-school suspensions. EDFacts data from the NCES pro-vided school student proficiency data. Identifying Neighboring TPSs. I developed a straight-forward means of identifying neighboring TPSs, which are non charter public schools whose students could have enrolled in a charter school, using three criteria: distance, jurisdiction, and grade range. The first matching criterion was distance. Based on the assumption that students in the closest TPSs are the most likely to attend a given charter school, I included the closest five TPSs as the comparison for each char-ter. TPSs located more than 30 miles from a charter school were considered too far away to be reasonably close neighbors and were excluded. The second criterion was the charter school’s rela-tionship to the school district in which it is located. Charter schools authorized by a school district were matched only to TPSs in the same district. Those autho-rized by an entity other than the school district were allowed to match with any TPS in the state. The third criterion was grade range. Neighboring TPSs were considered comparable only to a charter serving overlapping grade ranges. Matching grade ranges avoided inappropriate matches, such as between a high school and a nearby charter elementary school. Not all charter schools could be matched to five neighboring TPSs. Of about 5,700 charter schools in the CCD in 2011–12 890 were excluded because they were special-purpose schools, too small, or virtual char -ter schools. About 4,800 charter schools (84 percent) were matched to at least one neighboring TPS, and 4,280 (89 percent) were matched to five . In addition, Louisiana charters were not included in this analysis because all the states charter schools were identified as alternative schools on the CCD. Comparing Charters to Their Neighboring TPSs. Even with an ideal comparison group of TPSs, comparing schools’ average characteristics can be misleading. Comparing averages assumes charters are reasonably uniform, which national comparisons in the report Dif-ferences on Balance demonstrated to be false. Comparing TPSs The comparisons in these state reports look at the distribution of differences between each charter school and its neighboring TPSs. They show how much each charter school’s student composition differs from the average for its five neighboring TPSs and in what direc-tion. The distributions of differences reveal how often, how much, and in what direction charter schools differ from TPSs in terms of the school’s suspension rates and students’ race, poverty, special education and limited English proficiency (LEP) status, and proficiency. (Continued next page) 23