Trego's Mountain Ear

John Lott has written a post relevant to Montana’s legislation that permits, for the first time, charter schools.  The entire article is at the link above – and here’s an excerpt that may get you to click the link:

“Montana is one of the last states without charter schools, but that may be about to change. Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a pair of bills into law that establish separate and distinct charter school systems in the state — one widely embraced by Republican legislators and advocates of past charter school efforts, and the other supported by the bulk of Montana’s public education organizations as well as a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers.”

Lott cites The National Charter School Study III 2023 (accessible at: https://ncss3.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Credo-NCSS3-Report.pdf

The report is some 82 pages, and the summary of findings begins with

“Looking at year-to-year academic progress from 2015 to 2019, the typical charter school student in our national sample had reading and math gains that outpaced their peers in the traditional public schools (TPS) they otherwise would have attended. We report these differences as marginal days of additional (or fewer) days of learning on a learning benchmark of 180 days of learning each school year for matched TPS students. In math, charter school students, on average, advanced their learning by an additional six days in a year’s time, and in reading added 16 days of learning. Figure 1: Annual Academic Growth of Charter School Students, Reading and Math ** Significant at p ≤ 0.01 Figure above originally appears as Figure 1.7 in CSP31. These average effects are across all students, all schools, for all time periods. There is considerable variation around these averages and this variation forms the foundation for additional analyses and findings in our two papers.”

The report suggests that some charter schools do a better job than others:

“School Management – students who attend a charter school that is part of a charter management organization (CMO) experience significantly accelerated growth compared to students enrolled in standalone charter schools (SCS). Even so, CMO schools and SCS provide stronger learning than TPS in reading, and CMOs do so in math. CMO-affREADING Worse Same Betteriliated students advanced by 27 additional days in reading and 23 more days in math over TPS, both of which are statistically significant. Stand-alone charter schools still grew significantly more than TPS in reading by 10 additional days of learning, but were no different in math. Given that SCS serve two-thirds of all students enrolled in charter schools, soft math performance in these schools taints the otherwise decisive results in other parts of the study.”

Since Charter Schools will be coming to Montana, taking the time to read the report just might be worthwhile.