By Ed Ring

If you can’t beat them, join them. That seems to be the strategy that the Los Angeles teachers union, UTLA, is taking with its longtime adversary Alliance charter schools, a network of 26 independently run but publicly funded schools operating within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). After years of antagonism, UTLA is ramping up its efforts to unionize Alliance teachers and counselors.

Unfortunately, a study released last week by the California Policy Center (CPC) and co-authored by a former senior director at Moody’s Analytics suggests these schools (and their students) won’t be better off in the union fold.

LAUSD’s enrollment has fallen from roughly 694,000 in 2007/2008 to 600,000, a drop of around 2.5 percent per year on average. Meanwhile, the city’s charter schools, of which Alliance is the biggest network, are flourishing. Enrollment has surged by 138 percent over the last five years to more than 140,000 students with another 68,200 students on wait lists.

CPC’s new study helps explain this growth. It finds that Alliance charter schools have significantly better educational achievement outcomes than those of students at traditional public schools.

The study compares nine LAUSD Alliance charter schools with nine LAUSD traditional schools and concludes that Alliance students have superior average Academic Performance Index (API) scores (762 vs. 701), higher graduation rates (91.5 percent vs. 84.1 percent), and lower dropout rates (8.5 percent vs. 15.9 percent) than their traditional school counterparts.

In an effort to overcome the common criticism that these types of comparisons cherry-pick their data or are elsewhere biased, the CPC study examines schools that are geographically and socioeconomically similar. Chosen schools are located within a few miles of each other in the same south-central neighborhoods, and the student bodies at both sets of schools are 91 percent Latino. (Approximately the same percent of students from both cohorts also receive free school lunches.)

Notably, the study finds that students at LAUSD traditional schools outperform their Alliance counterparts when it comes to average SAT scores: 1299 vs. 1122. But digging into the data a little further suggests that there is more to the story. Only 31 percent of juniors and seniors at traditional schools took the SAT in 2014 compared to 72 percent of Alliance students. Normalizing the average Alliance SAT score to include only the top 31 percent of test takers bumps its average score up to 1417, placing them in the 41st percentile nationally.

The story of Kip Morales is instructive in explaining the success of charter schools. Several years ago, Morales was one of the highest performing teachers at his LAUSD traditional school, but he was laid off as a result of the union policy known as “last-in, first-out,” which places more importance on seniority than performance when jobs need to shed. He took his talents to Alliance, and became teacher of the year.

Morales tells the Daily News that the best educators at Alliance earn more than $79,000 in only their second year of teaching — a level that would have taken him around 16 years to achieve at a traditional school. It’s clear from Morales’ story why Alliance is able to attract some of the best young teachers available. However, these successful policies like performance-based pay and the freedom to hire and fire would be severely threatened by UTLA unionization.

Despite these attractive pay packages, Alliance doesn’t achieve its success through fiscal profligacy. The CPC study found that per-pupil costs are 31 percent lower at Alliance high-schools than at traditional high-schools ($10,600 vs. $15,372). In this sense, charter schools are almost as good of a deal for taxpayers as they are for parents.

Educational achievement, costs, and — most importantly — parents show the success of the charter school system. No wonder unions want to rain on the parade.

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.