Nothing frosts me more than Diane Ravitch and her friends’ charge that charter schools amount to “corporate reform.” This is such nonsense. The charter movement was launched in the 1990s by public activists and state legislators – most of them Democrats – while business conservatives were busy pushing standards or vouchers.

The critics also love to repeat that charters perform no better than other public schools. This statement may have been true in 2009, if one accepts the critics’ favorite study, from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes or CREDO. But a closer look at those results reveals a deeper truth. Where charter authorizers do their jobs, charters vastly outperform traditional public schools, with far less money. Where authorizers fall down on the job, letting failing charters live on just like traditional schools, the average charter performs no better, and sometimes worse.

The original charter idea was to open the public school monopoly to competition from new schools, operated on contract by other organizations: nonprofits, teacher cooperatives, universities, even for-profit businesses. The charter was usually a five-year performance contract, laying out the results expected from the school. Charter authorizers – typically school districts or state boards of education – would reject charter applications from groups that did not appear equipped to succeed, and they would close schools if students did not learn as promised.



This approach is largely a reality in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and Washington, D.C. But any good idea can be implemented poorly. In Arizona two statewide authorizers handed out 15-year charters like candy but lacked the capacity to oversee the more than 500 schools that sprung up. The result: CREDO's 2009 and 2013 studies both found charter students gaining academic ground more slowly than their socioeconomic peers in traditional public school.

Texas experienced similar problems and results. In 2003 Ohio gave non-profit organizations both the right to authorize charters and a financial incentive to do so, opening the floodgates to mediocre schools.

In Massachusetts, by contrast, the state board was careful who got a charter and closed schools where kids were not learning. CREDO found that the typical charter student in Boston gained the equivalent of 12 extra months of learning in reading and 13 extra months in math every year, compared to demographically similar students in traditional public schools. Charter students in New York City gained “an additional one month of learning in reading" and in "math the advantage for charter students is about five months of additional learning in one school year."

