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Abstract

A common criticism of charter schools is that they systematically remove or “counsel out” their lowest performing students. However, relatively little is currently known about whether low-performing students are in fact more likely to exit charter schools than surrounding traditional public schools. We use longitudinal student-level data from two large urban school systems that prior research has found to have effective charter school sectors–New York City and Denver, Colorado–to evaluate whether there is a differential relationship between low-performance on standardized test scores and the probability that students exit their schools by sector attended. We find no evidence of a differential relationship between prior performance and the likelihood of exiting a school by sector. Low-performing students in both cities are either equally likely or less likely to exit their schools than are student in traditional public schools.

5. Conclusion

For those concerned that charters respond to policy incentives by encouraging greater student mobility, these results suggest that is not the case in Denver or New York City. Contrary to research from the past several years (Dauter & Fuller, 2011; Finch et al., 2009; Finch et al., 2008; Hanushek et al., 2007; Karp, 2010; Powers, Topper, & Silver, 2012), results from the present study indicate students in these two large urban school systems are overall either equally or less likely to exit charter schools than they are to exit traditional public schools, holding other factors constant. Low-performing students are on average more mobile than their higher-performing counterparts. However, we find no meaningful differential relationship between prior test scores and attrition across sectors. Further, when we take into account that charter school students are overall less likely to exit their school than are traditional public school students, we find that low-performing students are equally likely or less likely to exit the charter sector. Our results from New York City and Denver are very similar to those reported for an anonymous school district in the Midwest by Zimmer and Guarino (2013). Of course, charter school sectors differ substantially by locality, and thus exit patterns could also vary in other cities. However, that research now finds consistent results across three urban school systems suggests that they might hold more generally.