When parents choose a charter school over their neighborhood public school, it’s usually because they’re hopeful that it will provide their child a better education. Yet a review of academic performance data from across North Carolina shows this hope usually goes unfulfilled. A review of data from the NC Department of Public Instruction shows that public schools outperform charters on nearly every academic metric — and have been doing so for a decade.
There are two ways that we can compare publics and charters: growth and letter grade. A growth score shows how much a group of students have improved across a school year, while letter grades mostly relate to a school’s raw performance (which tends to closely correlate with students’ socioeconomic status). Though we will look at both metrics, growth scores tend to be better for comparing schools, because they show how much students actually improve during the school year. In other words, a school contributes little to “growth” if students show strong academic performance both before the school year begins and when it ends.
In the 2022-2023 school year, North Carolina’s traditional public schools over-performed charters in every category of academic growth. Breaking that down, we see that publics had the highest percentage of “exceeding growth,” which means they have significantly more kids who grew more academically than expected. They also have the highest percentage of kids who either exceeded growth or met it (meaning they performed as expected).
Public schools also have the lowest percentage of "not meeting growth," which means they have fewer kids who performed worse than expected.
Finally, public schools in North Carolina have over-performed charters in the number of schools "exceeding" growth targets every year for a decade (with the exception of the 2017-2018 school year, when they tied). This means that they had more students who performed better than expected.
In meeting kids where they are academically and helping them grow to and beyond their potential, North Carolina's public schools have performed better than charter schools overall for the last decade.
But what about those letter grades?
We would normally expect charters to vastly over-perform public schools when it comes to letter grade scores. This is because letter grade scores are based mostly on raw academic performance, than student growth (eg. improvement). Data shows that school letter grades actually do a better job of indicating the wealth of attending families than the actual quality of the school that’s being graded, and the average population of charter schools is significantly higher on the socioeconomic scale than public schools. That is, most North Carolina charter schools have student populations that are much wealthier and whiter than the population at large.
Yet when we look at last year’s data, charter schools do not over-perform on letter grade scores. Public schools have both more "A" schools and fewer "F" schools than charters. Charter schools do outperform public schools when it comes to the middle of the road: charters have slightly more "B" schools and fewer C/D schools.
Yet this is a paradox: given their socioeconomically advantaged student population, charter school letter grades should be strongly over-performing public schools. Yet they do not. So why are public schools winning in academic growth year after year?
The answer probably lies in oversight. Public schools are held to significantly more accountablility requirements than charter schools. Charter schools are not required to follow the NC Standard Course of Study, nor are they restricted in class size. Their teachers do not need to be licensed, and the school itself is not accountable to locally elected school boards. They are not required to make financial records public, as public schools are, and they are allowed to be run by for-profit companies (and many are). This is a perfect recipe for poorly-run schools which are more interested in making money than improving economic outcomes for their students.
When that happens, it can lead to shut down orders by state authorities that can impact educational consistency for students. Or even worse, it doesn't, and the lack of state oversight allows shoddy schools to fly under the radar for years, consistently receiving F grades with no push from the state to fix underlying issues with changes in curriculum or teacher licensure.
Of course, none of this is to say that all charter schools themselves are "bad." Clearly, some charter schools do deliver strong academic performance, while some some public schools don't. Yet on average, the pattern of the data is clear that in the state of North Carolina, public schools are stronger than charters academically.
What about private schools?
Besides traditional public and charter schools, there is a third option: private schools. It's very difficult to compare the academic performance of private schools with their public and charter counterparts, however. There are three main reasons why:
- Private schools only have to take standardized tests in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11
- Private schools may choose from a long list of standardized tests they may administer, which usually is not the same as those taken by public school students, making apples to apples comparisons impossible
- Private schools aren’t even required to publicly release the results of the assessments they do take
The bottom line is that no one really knows just how private schools in North Carolina are performing academically. This is by design, as private schools operate under even less oversight than charter schools do. Not only are they susceptible to all of the same risks of disreputable operators that charter schools are, but many more besides.
Of course, parents have any number of criteria when choosing a school for their children. Sometimes academic performance is high on that list, and sometimes it's not. Yet in an overheated atmosphere of education politics, it's worth knowing that the evidence shows that public schools are probably the best option we have. And the differences between levels of accountability between public, charter, and private schools means public schools will probably be the safest option for a long time to come.
