Attending a charter school in Texas doesn’t seem to have a big effect on students’ results — either in school or later in life — compared to attending a traditional public school.
But that’s hardly the most interesting finding from a new working paper by William Dobbie of Princeton University and Roland Fryer of Harvard, released today by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Texas is the birthplace of highly regarded charter school networks like KIPP, Yes Prep and this year’s Broad Prize winners, Idea Public Schools. And while the study finds few positive academic effects from charters overall, when it homes in on these “no excuses” charters, it finds more encouraging results. These schools tend to lift students’ test scores, high school graduation rates and college attendance.
However, those benefits seem to fade once students reach the job market.
The authors find this subset of high-performing charters — “schools that tend to have higher behavioral expectations, stricter disciplinary codes, uniform requirements, and an extended school day and year – are effective at increasing human capital on almost every dimension we are able to measure in our data.”
Yet, they write, “despite these short-run human capital benefits, the impact of attending a No Excuses charter school on earnings is only a statistically insignificant $101 (se=176) per year of attendance.”
In other words, attending a high-performing charter school doesn’t necessarily lead to higher wages later in life, at least in Texas. That leads to an attention-grabbing conclusion.
Charter schools, in particular No Excuses charter schools, are considered by many to be the most important education reform of the past quarter century. At the very least, however, this paper cautions that charter schools may not have the large effects on earnings many predicted. It is plausible this is due to the growing pains of an early charter sector that was “building the plane as they flew it.” This will be better known with the fullness of time. Much more troubling, it seems, is the possibility that what it takes to increase achievement among the poor in charter schools deprives them of other skills that are important for labor markets.
A different group of researchers looked at charter school graduates in Florida, where no excuses charters are rare, and found quite different results. They discovered students who attended charter high schools in the Sunshine State saw a salary boost of about $2,000 a year.
Dobbie and Fryer write that there’s little overlap between that study’s methods and their own. The Florida study looked at students who attended charter middle schools, and then compared the results for those who attended charter high schools with those who attended district-run high schools. When researchers added students who attended district-run middle schools into the mix, the annual salary boost from attending a charter high school fell below $500.
The gap between the two studies may not be as large as meets the eye. For now, Dobbie and Fryer’s paper notes, a full explanation for their findings remains elusive.
Still, they find one measure of academic achievement does correlate with higher wages once students get older: High school graduation.
Their new study reports “there is a robust positive correlation of high school graduation effects with labor market outcomes” for Texas students. Coupled with the results from Florida (where charters, on average, don’t really boost test scores), these findings suggest that test scores are not the only indicator of academic quality that matters.
At a minimum, it might be worth taking graduation rates into account. In fact, Dobbie and Fryer suggest high school graduation rates “may be a better short-run instrument, at least as compared to state test scores, to evaluate the efficacy of charter schools” — especially for charter schools that already do a decent job of improving students’ test results.
