Charter school have gone from acceptance to excellence, and now are outperforming their traditional public school counterparts, multiple recent school rankings revealed.
U.S. News and World Report released its 2017 U.S. News Best High Schools National Rankings in late April. For the first time, charter schools comprised a majority of the top schools, taking six of the top 10 spots, including the top three. Pacific Collegiate Charter in Santa Cruz topped the list of California schools and ranked 10th nationally. It was one of eight California charter schools to crack the top 100 national rankings.
In addition, magnet schools, public schools with specialized instruction, such as a focus on math and science or the arts, comprised three of the four remaining spots in the top 10. In other words, nine of the top 10 schools were schools of choice.
Taken together, charters and magnet schools took up 60 percent of the top 100 schools, despite representing just 16 percent of the roughly 6,000 schools U.S. News deemed “medal-winning.” Schools were ranked based on factors such as “graduation rates, performance on state assessments and student participation in and performance on Advanced Placement tests,” U.S. News reported.
Just a week later, charter schools claimed nine of the top 10 spots in the Washington Post’s 2017 Most Challenging High Schools in America List. The “Challenge Index” was inspired by the success of math teachers Jaime Escalante and Ben Jimenez in helping kids in the poor Hispanic community of East Los Angeles to master the AP calculus exam starting in the 1980s, as depicted in the movie “Stand and Deliver.” Instead of focusing on graduation rates, the index focuses on participation in AP, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests.
The California Charter Schools Association’s recently released fifth edition of its “Portrait of the Movement” report provides additional cause for celebration. The state’s public charter schools “continue to outperform traditional public schools at disproportionately high numbers,” especially among Latino and African American students, CCSA determined. Previous research found that charter students had greater acceptance rates at University California colleges than traditional public schools, particularly for low-income, African American and Latino students.
“This report shows that California charter schools continue to beat the odds by helping their students achieve at higher levels than their peers in traditional public schools,” California Charter Schools Association President and CEO Jed Wallace said in a statement. “Year after year we see charter schools in California using their freedom and flexibility to deliver results for students that surpass expectations.”
More and more parents and students certainly seem to think that charters are a better option than their traditional public schools — and they are voting with their feet, as evidenced by the explosion of charter schools in recent years. California’s original charter school law was passed in 1992 and went into effect in 1993. By the 1998-99 school year, there were 177 charter schools in the state, which grew to 746 schools by 2008-09. This year, there are 1,254 charter schools educating nearly 600,000 students (nearly 10 percent of all students in the state), according to CCSA.
Freed from many of the government and union rules that tie the hands of traditional public schools, charter schools have led to a renaissance in the state’s long-stagnant monopolized public education system. Increasingly, parents are asking, “Why can’t my kid’s school be like that?” Not every charter will be a winner, of course; that is the nature of experimentation and risk-taking. But the result of this flexibility and competition will be greater innovation and more options for all students.
