Charter Schools Help NYC

The evidence piles up that in our largest city, charter schools can help the poor, even while the city’s traditional public schools continue to pile up an abysmal record.

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that in New York City public schools:

• “The new results for charter students represent an increase of 22 days of learning in reading compared to their results four years ago. Results for math have remained the same.

• “For Black and Hispanic students, the analysis indicates a significant academic advantage from charter school enrollment.

• “Hispanic charter school students perform at the same level as their white district school peers, representing no annual learning gap.

• “For the analysis, a total of 97,118 charter school students from 248 schools are followed from the 2011- 12 school year to 2015-16 school year.

• “Students attending charter schools affiliated with a Charter Management Organization (CMO) have better learning gains than district school peers in both reading and math. The positive impact is equivalent to about 57 days of learning in reading and 103 more days in math.”

Meanwhile, “The same toxic conditions plaguing a Bronx school where a teen was murdered last week — bullying, verbal attacks and violence — are rampant across its home district, according to Department of Education data,” Selim Algar reported in The New York Post on October 3, 2017. “A total of 53 percent of polled District 12 teachers said they observed bullying ‘some’ or ‘most of the time’ in a questionnaire last year — the highest rate out of the city’s 32 school districts.”