Pennsylvania Is The Cyber Charter Capital Of The Country. It’s Not Something To Celebrate
My newest post for the Bucks County Beacon, looking at new research that shows cyber charters coming up short compared even to brick and mortar charters.
Sarah Cordes, a policy scholar and associate professor at Temple University, noted that the literature on charter school effects seems focused primarily on test scores, and so she set out to add to the literature in the field by looking at other impacts of charter schools, particularly those that point to long-term effects.
There are economists out there who insist that test scores correlate to life earnings, but their research is highly debatable. Even among some education reformers, the notion that raising a student’s test score will improve their life outcomes is a discredited idea, lacking evidence and sense.
So Cordes research looks at other outcomes, including high school graduation and post-high school enrollment. Her paper (with the not very sexy title “Cyber versus Brick and Mortar: Achievement, Attainment, and Postsecondary Outcomes in Pennsylvania Charter High Schools”) offers some intriguing results.
Brick and mortar charter results mirror previous research; basically, some positive effects in certain situations.
Briefly, I find that brick and mortar charter schools have positive or no effects across all outcomes and that these positive effects are concentrated among Black and economically disadvantaged students, and students living in urban districts.
But for cyber charters, the results were worse than both public schools and brick and mortar charter schools.
The short form is this:
Students who enroll in a cyber charter school are 9.5 percentage points less likely to graduate, 16.8 percentage points less likely to enroll in a postsecondary institution, 15.8 percentage points less likely to enroll in a 4-year institution, and 2.3 percentage points less likely to enroll in a 2-year institution.