A study out today by by Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel of Harvard University compares charter school student achievement in 35 states and the District of Columbia. Ratings are based on a test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card” and the “gold standard of assessments.”

How do New Jersey charter school students do compared to students in other states studied?

We come in at a very respectable 6th, just after Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and Oklahoma, largely due to high-performing public charters in urban areas like Newark, Camden, Trenton, Passaic, Paterson, Plainfield, and Asbury Park.

Peterson and Shakeel chose NAEP scores as an indicator of student learning because it is “a low-stakes test” that is “not tied to teacher pay or school rankings.” And the data, Peterson told Greg Toppo, is “very clean because exactly the same test is being administered to every single student. So we are comparing student performances on the same tests and no other.”

A few NJ-specific take-aways from the study:

• The analysis finds that “students at schools run by charter networks outperform students at independent charters, on average, while students at schools run by for-profit organizations have lower scores on NAEP, on average.” That’s significant because NJ has no for-profit charter schools and a significant number of schools run by non-profit charter networks like Uncommon, KIPP, and College Achieve. The study doesn’t look at virtual charters, although NJ doesn’t have any, and the researchers note that the study years, 2010-2019, are pre-pandemic; charter school enrollment increased by 7% nationwide, or 240,000 students, during school closures. Also, NAEP only tests 4th and 8th graders, so there are no conclusions about preschool and high school.

• Peterson and Shakeel created the rankings through the “Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG)” at Harvard University, which adjusts for individual students’ background characteristic like low-income, special education, English Language Learners, etc. (For a full discussion of the methodology, see here.) They also compared rankings to those from the Urban Institute and CREDO at Stanford University.

• Nationwide Black, Hispanic, and urban students attend “higher-quality higher-quality charter schools than those available to white and suburban students. But an alternative interpretation is more likely: White and suburban students have access to higher-quality district schools than those available to Blacks, Hispanics, and city residents.”

This certainly tracks for NJ, where our charter schools are clustered in urban centers: students at a charter network in Paterson “exceeded the state proficiency average in English Language Arts in every single grade—and in several grades by double-digit percentages”; at a charter in Jersey City, students were almost twice as likely as their statewide peers to meet their grade level’s proficiency standards in reading and math; and in Newark, our largest charter sector, the percentage of third-graders reading at grade-level at charter schools is twice as high as third-graders who attend district schools.

Peterson and Shakeel write, “we hope these rankings will spur charter-school improvement in much the same way that NAEP results have stimulated efforts to improve student achievement more generally.”

(Chart courtesy of The 74.)

These findings could indicate that Black, Hispanic, and urban students attend higher-quality charter schools than those available to white and suburban students. But an alternative interpretation is more likely: White and suburban students have access to higher-quality district schools than those available to Blacks, Hispanics, and city residents.