Charts: 32 Percent Of Charter Kids Pulled From Privates

First things first:  The numbers -- 193,000 kids (Rand via LA Times) -- are small, over all, for a nation of 50 million + schoolchildren.  But they're much bigger in some places where charters have proliferated, pulling 32 percent of their enrollment from privates.  Some folks will look at these figures and say that it proves charters promote privatization, which is, I think a false connection.  Others will look at them and say, hey, charters are a viable alternative to private schools in some places -- bringing parents back into the public system. 

Comments

[Bruce]

Steve Barr and I have agreed on your last point -- that well run charter schools have the potential (and now, the reality) for pulling parents who had already abandoned the traditional local public schools back into the system, and therefore of building support for paying taxes that will fund that system. But another takeaway from the chart is that chartered schools are having a harder time competing with independent high schools (like Harvard-Westlake, or Crossroads) than they are with the private elementary schools. One might conclude with two suggestions: (1) that the traditional public school system had better focus on improving its comprehensive primary schools, the backbone of a nation's educational system; and (2) that they should be willing to approve middle school charters that can prepare students for independent upper schools, which is the level at which our 20th-century model is most obviously broken.

[Sarah]

Bruce raises an excellent point. The difference between 32% and 15% is very significant. Though I’d wait for 10 more years of data to see if those rates level out, initial data does appear to indicate that independent high schools are still going quite strong.