Charter Schools as a Vehicle for Education Reform: Implementation and Outcomes at Three Inner-City Sites

Abstract

This study examined the impact of 3 2nd-year charter schools (1 elementary, 1 middle, and 1 high school) on student achievement, school climate, and pedagogy. All schools served predominantly African American students in an inner-city district. Using a matched treatment-control student analytical design, charter school enrollees were individually matched to highly comparable control students of the same ethnicity, poverty level, gender, and ability. Qualitative and descriptive analyses showed reasonable to good progress in program implementation, very strong school climate, positive teacher and parent perceptions, largely traditional but academically-focused teaching, and positive student achievement on state-mandated tests (p < .05 on 12 out of 18 school × cohort × subtest comparisons). Interpretations of results stress the likely implications of teacher and family choice for effective implementation of the charter schools' academic and organizational programs.

Notes

¹A special circumstance would be where a sufficiently large number of students apply to different charter schools, but due to space restrictions at each school, selections are made on a random basis. Despite the advantages of such randomized designs for internal validity, the generalizability of results might be restricted to only those charter schools that are relatively popular in the community (perhaps due to already producing high achievement), thus threatening external validity for making inferences about the broader charter school population.

²A detailed reporting of qualitative and descriptive results from surveys, observations, and interviews is provided in Ross, McDonald, et al. (2005).

^aBecause pretest scores were not available, no adjusted means or adjusted effect sizes were computed.

^bEffect sizes reported are unadjusted for pretest for ELEM, but adjusted for MID and HIGH.

*p < .05.

**p < .01.

***p < .001.