Pennsylvania Charter Schools: Are They Better Than Your Traditional High School?

Before moving to Lebanon, PA, I attended a charter school in South Windsor, Connecticut during my elementary school years. After attending Kindergarten in my school district, my parents decided to take a leap and enter my sister and I in the lottery system for a charter school located thirty minutes from our house. My sister and I both made it into the school and my mom found a part time position in at an advertising agency a short drive from the school, so the commute worked for everyone. I will speak on my experience at that charter school more throughout this post, but for now I want to define what a charter school is and how it differs from a traditional high school.

Unlike common misconceptions, charter schools are public schools that receive both federal and state funding, but they operate independently from the traditional school district structure. This offers many benefits for students, particularly those who were failed by their school district, because charter schools are exempt from many regulations both on the state and local levels. Charter schools use this freedom and flexibility to meet the needs to students, improve student learning and increase learning opportunities, provide families with a wide range of educational opportunities that public schools do not have the means to, encourage innovative teaching methods, and provide teachers with different professional opportunities. The charter school has a charter, a legislative contract, with the state that holds them accountable in exchange for the freedom the schools are granted.

Based on my experience, I can say that my school fulfilled many of these goals. Many kids from the urban areas of Hartford attended my school and received an education that didn’t fail them the way their traditional school district would have. I never realized charter schools were created to serve as a solution to the problems with traditional school districts, particularly in urban areas with various minorities, but it makes sense considering most of the students at my school were not white and came from various socioeconomic backgrounds.

Studies have shown that charter schools outperform traditional public schools, particularly in categories for students of color. A 2023 study revealed that charter schools produce more growth in their students than traditional public schools. There are two categories of charter schools: those run by charter management organizations and those who are stand-alone which includes the online charter schools. The charter schools run by charter management organizations have shown to produce the best growth with 43 percent of students performing better than their peers in traditional public schools and 42 percent performing the same. However, the stand-alone charter schools still show 32 percent of students performing better than peers in traditional public schools and 50 percent performing the same. The researchers reasoned that since most of the online charter schools fall into the stand-alone category they could bring those averages down, so it would be interesting to see what the data would be if the online charter schools were their own category.

The study also showed that students of color are outpacing their traditional public school peers in reading and math. Black students had “35 more days in reading growth and 29 more days in math growth than Black students in traditional public schools” and black students living in poverty showed stronger results when they had “gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools.” The same trend was seen for Hispanic students who gained “30 days in reading and 19 days in math over Hispanic students in traditional public schools” and Hispanic students living in poverty “gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.” While charter schools showed more growth in these groups of students, “neither group managed to meet the 180-day benchmark for standard learning” so the achievement gap has yet to be fully closed in both charter and traditional public schools.

This leads to the point I wanted to consider: are charter schools the better option? In my opinion, they provide you with a unique learning experience, open you to new ideas and people, and make more strides than public schools are able to. When I transitioned to a traditional public school after moving to Pennsylvania, I noticed the difference in the quality of education I was receiving. First off, my new school was in rural PA where most everyone was white so there was a huge lack of diversity when at my old school white people had actually been the minority. Second, my old school had not provided better education in EVERY area such as our poor band program which essentially existed to get kids exposed to instruments and basic tunes like Mary Had a Little Lamb, but the quality of basic school subjects was by far significantly better than at my new school. My old school also celebrated culture a lot. We all took Spanish starting in first grade through fifth and also took Mandarin in third through fifth grade. We had Chinese New Year celebrations, Day of the Dead celebrations, guests come in and show us karate and where it originated from, and a day where your parents came to school and each classroom was a different country with crafts and demonstrations of various aspects of that culture among other events.

Aside from my opinion, I want to focus specifically on charter schools in Pennsylvania, most of which are located in or around Philadelphia drawing from that largely urban crowd like my charter school did. In a recent study of students’ reading and math scores “on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, researchers compared charter school performance in 35 states and Washington, D.C” Out of those 35 states, Pennsylvania ranked 31st. The study also went on to find that “Pennsylvania had the second-largest performance gap between white and Hispanic students’ scores, ranking above only Washington, D.C.” This has sparked conversation about whether charters should change to be independent, whether charter schools run by for-profit organizations should exist, and whether we should start regulating charter schools more closely. Researchers looked into the scores based on the type of school and found that the way the school was governed impacted the scores as “students in charter school networks scored higher than independent charter school students, while students schools run by for-profit organizations scored lower. And students in charter schools authorized by state education agencies had higher scores than those at charters authorized by local school districts, non-educational organizations and universities.”

To conclude, I think it is apparent that the mission and purpose of charter schools is something one that everyone can get behind and agree with. Every education system has its faults which makes me wonder if further studies were done that focused on our education system in the US, would they explain why charter school scores are still limited and whether the gap between traditional public schools and charter schools would exist if our nation’s education system were improved. However, I think as the study shows, the type of governance a charter school has will impact the quality of education it provides students as well as the location of the charter school since it has to be able to support the students it is drawing in. Charter schools still have a long way to go, but I think they illustrate the purpose every school in the US should have and strive to fulfill to the best of their ability.

Sources:

https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/programs-and-services/instruction/elementary-and-secondary-education/charter-schools.html

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/charter-schools-are-outperforming-traditional-public-schools-6-takeaways-from-a-new-study/2023/06

https://www.discovery.org/education/2022/09/09/tackling-misconceptions-about-charter-schools/

https://penncapital-star.com/briefs/pennsylvania-ranks-near-the-bottom-in-national-study-of-charter-school-performance/