Charters Drive Traditional Schools To Try Harder

They push the old-fashioned schools and develop effective strategies

Charter schools are not a silver bullet for education reform, a new report says, but applying the best practices from some charter schools to low-performing public schools may increase student achievement.

Early data show that the strategy – applied in Houston and Denver pilot programs – yielded "promising" results, according to the report, titled "Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools" and released Thursday by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

Comments

[DanR]

Neither the Christian Science Monitor nor the pilot program looked at whether charter schools drive traditional schools to try harder. The Denver and Houston pilots involved increasing per-student spending by over $2,000 per student, and test scores went up.

The policy paper from the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institute, which sponsored the study, says, "new evidence points to a path forward to save the three million students in our nation's worst-performing schools, for a price of about $6 billion...."

That's $6 billion per year in additional government spending to increase student scores on standardized test.