How do charter school options affect student discipline in traditional public schools in Arkansas?

A research paper entitled “,” by ACRE Policy Analyst Dr. Mavuto Kalulu, ACRE Scholar and BT����Associate Professor of Economics Dr. Thomas Snyder, and former ACRE Undergraduate Research Fellow and BT����Alumnus Aaron Newell, was published in the November 2019 edition of the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines.��

The Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines is a journal of the Academy of Business Disciplines sponsored by the University of North Florida.��

The authors examine the effect charter schools have on student behavior in traditional public schools. They find that an increase in charter school enrollment is associated with fewer disciplinary infractions in traditional public schools in Arkansas.

From the authors:

In Arkansas, charter enrollment appears to be a win-win for students in both types of schools. Existing Arkansas studies have shown that students perform well in charter schools compared to traditional public schools, and that student performance improves under competition. Our study shows that charter schools also reduce the disciplinary infractions at traditional public schools.��Teachers have listed classroom behavior as a major obstacle. Charter schools can provide alternative approaches and competition that can benefit traditional public schools. State and local governments can look to charter schools to help alleviate the disciplinary issues in the traditional public schools and improve student performance.”

The research paper was a project Newell undertook with Kalulu and Snyder during his tenure as an ACRE Undergraduate Research Fellow in the spring semester of 2018. Newell is currently a first-year law student at Bowen School of Law.

Does charter school competition harm students in traditional public schools?

According to research conducted by ACRE experts, the answer is no.

ACRE Policy Analyst Dr. Mavuto Kalulu, ACRE Scholar and BT����Associate Professor of Economics Dr. Thomas Snyder, and BT����Mathematics Graduate Student Saliou N. Ouattara were recently published in the Fall 2017 edition of the EJournal of Education Policy.

Their article, finds a “positive and statistically-significant relationship” between elementary charter school enrollment and traditional Iowa Assessment scores across school districts.

More specifically, improvements in traditional public school students’ math, reading and language test scores were greater in school districts that had a larger percentage of students enrolled in charter schools. The results suggest that test scores will rise over 1 point (1-100 scale) for every 10 percentage-point increase in charter school enrollment in a school district.

Kalulu, Snyder and Ouattara conclude:

“The number of open-enrollment charters schools in Arkansas is growing, and the performance of the charter schools have been positive. However, critics of charter schools typically say that the emergence of charter schools will harm traditional public schools. The charter schools may skim the best students and may leave those with special needs to traditional public schools. If so, the authors would expect to see charter school enrollment negatively affect the average student performance in traditional public schools. The evidence suggests the opposite. The study finds a significant positive change in test scores with charter school options.”

The rest of ACRE’s work on K-12 education can be found here.

When a charter school opens in the vicinity of a traditional public school, some people fear that the decreased enrollment caused by students transferring will cause the traditional public schools to shut down. When a public school shuts down, children are assigned to other schools, which they and their parents may or may not like. This fear about charter schools is based on the assumption that traditional public schools cannot adjust to the competition by improving their standards.

show that in the 2015–16 school year, 18 out of 1,037 traditional public schools closed down. Two out of the 18 closed schools were in a district that did not have a single student transfer to a charter school. Nine of the 18 schools were in districts that saw less than 1 percent of their students transfer to open enrollment charter schools. Pulaski County School District had the highest percentage of students leaving for charter schools at 14 percent. The school district, however, closed only 2 out of its 38 traditional public schools. The reason for the closure was the , which meant consolidation of some schools.

No evidence shows that charter schools in Arkansas are causing public schools to close down. Traditional public schools are able to adjust and offer an alternative to open enrollment charter schools. Rather than harming traditional public schools, open enrollment charter schools are helping traditional public schools to improve students’ performance.

An empirical evaluation of shows that open enrollment charter school students perform better than comparable students in traditional public schools in both math and literacy. While this outcome is a positive one for charter schools, it is not as gratifying if, in the process, open enrollment charter schools cause academic harm to students in traditional public schools. Some argue that open enrollment charter schools draw the best students from traditional public schools, leaving behind hard-to-teach students and leading to the loss of the positive peer influence from the good students. Others argue that the opposite is true: open enrollment charter schools mostly draw students who might not perform as well in a traditional public school setting and who might have a negative effect on their classmates. However, research shows that the entry of charter schools into the public school system is actually associated with improved performance for traditional public school students.

A study in Texas by examined the effect of charter schools on student performance in traditional public schools. The researchers found higher test scores for traditional public school students when there was a greater percentage of students leaving traditional public schools for charter schools. Similarly, a forthcoming study by the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics examines how the entry of open enrollment charter schools affects the performance of school districts in Arkansas. The results show that traditional public schools that face higher levels of competition from open enrollment charter schools experience improved test scores.

The introduction of charter schools in Arkansas creates a win-win outcome benefiting both charter school and traditional public school students. An added advantage of improved traditional public school performance is that students enrolling in traditional public schools will not have to compromise on their academics to have the opportunity to engage in extracurricular activities, such as football, that may not be available in charter schools.

Healthy competition among schools should be embraced. It incentivizes schools to provide a better quality education and students enrolled in both open enrollment charter schools and traditional public schools benefit. Concerns about increasing competition are well-meant but data shows that we have more to gain than we have to lose.

Dr. Mavuto Kalulu is a Policy Analyst at the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics. His work on education has been featured in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Jonesboro Sun, and the Log Cabin Democrat.

In contrast to traditional public schools, it’s true that some charter schools, such KIPP Delta, mostly employ nontraditionally licensed teachers, but that doesn’t make those teachers underqualified. show that some core academic subjects (English, reading and language arts, mathematics, science, foreign language, social studies, and visual and performing arts) in open enrollment charter schools are not taught by highly qualified teachers. The same is true for traditional public schools. A total of 215 schools in Arkansas have core academic classes not taught by highly qualified teachers Ninety one percent of these schools are traditional public schools while six percent are open enrollment charter schools. The other three percent are conversion charter schools. Table 1 depicts the top ten schools with the highest percentage of courses not taught bay highly qualified teachers.

Source: Arkansas Department of Education

Eight of the top ten schools that have core classes not taught by highly qualified teachers are traditional public schools while two of them are open enrollment charter schools. One can conclude that by the ADE’s definition of highly qualified teachers the worst affected schools in Arkansas are traditional public schools.

The real difference between traditional public school districts and open enrollment charter schools may lie in the routes that their teachers take to be licensed. Open enrollment charter schools may mainly hire nontraditionally licensed teachers. A traditionally licensed teacher has completed a formal teacher preparation program offered by a four-year college or university and has majored in education. In contrast, a nontraditionally licensed teacher has completed a degree in some other subject and has not majored in education. Arkansas offers a variety of , including the Teach for America program, the Arkansas Teacher Corps program, and the Provisional Professional Teaching License, all of which require professional experience in teaching or in the subject being taught.

One major concern is that nontraditionally licensed teachers lack classroom management skills and are therefore less effective at teaching students than traditionally licensed ones are. , however, shows that there is no significant difference in the ability to manage a classroom between traditionally and nontraditionally licensed teachers. Therefore, nontraditional routes to teacher licensing help schools to meet Arkansas’s teacher shortage without compromising on students’ education.

What’s more, open enrollment charter schools continuously evaluate their teachers’ effectiveness using various methods, such as classroom observation, teacher self-assessment, student growth, and parent and student surveys, some of which are very similar to the methods used by traditional public schools. If an open enrollment charter school does not meet the performance goals deemed appropriate by the ADE, it must close. Thus, charter schools actually have to prove their excellence in an even more rigorous environment.

We can evaluate these arguments by comparing the performance of traditional public schools with that of open enrollment charter schools in Arkansas using the results of two sets of standardized tests: the 2014–15 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams and the 2015–16 American College Testing (ACT) Aspire exams.

Figure 1 shows the percentage of students that met or exceeded expectations on the 2014–15 PARCC exams for both traditional public schools and open enrollment charter schools.

Source: Constructed using data from the Arkansas Department of Education.

On the 2014–15 exams, traditional public schools performed better in math by 1 percentage point, while in literacy, charter schools performed better by 3 percentage points.

Arkansas changed the exam type from PARCC to ACT Aspire for the 2015–16 school year. Figure 2 compares the ACT Aspire results for traditional public school students with the results for open enrollment charter school students. It shows the percentage of students in each school type that met readiness benchmarks in math, English, science, reading, and writing.

Source: Constructed using data from the Arkansas Department of Education.

In all subjects, open enrollment charter schools on average performed better than public schools on the 2015–16 exams.

Further empirical analysis by education and public policy professor Gary Ritter and others (2016) at the University of Arkansas has found that students attending open enrollment charter schools do indeed perform better than students in traditional public schools. The analysis accounts for the possible differences between the students in open enrollment charter schools and traditional public schools, such as student motivation levels and family socioeconomic background.

Instead of comparing open enrollment charter school students to the whole traditional public school population, Ritter and his team compared them to students who are similar, with the only difference being that they attend traditional public schools instead of open enrollment charter schools. The researchers found that test scores for students in open enrollment charter schools were significantly better in both math and literacy than the scores for comparable traditional public school students.

Individual open enrollment charter schools that do not perform better than traditional public schools run the risk of being closed as required by law, so they have an incentive to outperform. And the evidence does indeed show that open enrollment charter schools are performing better than traditional public schools.

Over the years, laws have been enacted to ensure that public schools are less segregated. For example, the Public School Choice Act of 1989 allowed for inter-district school choice, with a restriction that a student cannot transfer into a district that has a higher percentage of his or her race than his or her own residential district. The restriction was implemented because of the fear that white parents would transfer their students to predominantly white school districts, which tend to have more resources than predominantly minority districts.

Proponents of school choice argue that racial and economic divisions arise from the zoning system, which restricts the movement of students from their residential school districts into other school districts. School choice, they say, is the best way to allow minorities to transfer from poor-performing schools into better-performing schools, regardless of the racial composition of those schools.

Fast forward to May 2016, when a hearing on the expansion of charter schools in Little Rock revealed that concerns about school choice leading to segregation still linger. Charter school opponents argue that charter schools in Arkansas will worsen segregation. They believe that charter schools enroll mostly white and Asian students, leaving behind blacks and Hispanics in the failing traditional public schools.

To address this concern, the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics examined state-level data. Figure 1 shows the enrollment by race in both traditional public schools and open enrollment charter schools. Because some argued that Asians should not be included in the minority group during the Little Rock hearings on charter school expansion, our graph shows what open enrollment charter school enrollment looks like both when Asians are not grouped together with whites (green) and when they are (purple).

The graph depicts three different ways of looking at the same data. In all three cases, charter schools enroll a larger percentage of minorities than traditional public schools do. Using the Arkansas Department of Education categorization, which combines all races besides whites into the minority group (green bars), charter schools enroll a smaller percentage of white students (43.53%) than traditional public schools do (62.62%). When you exclude Asians from the minority group (purple bars), charter school enrollment is 47.73% white and Asian compared to 64.00% in traditional public schools. The third case, which perhaps is the main concern for charter school opponents, is the opportunity charter schools provide to Hispanics and blacks (blue bars). In Arkansas, half of the students in open enrollment charter schools are Hispanic black, while Hispanics and blacks comprise 32.32% of the total enrollment in traditional public schools. Thus, open enrollment charter schools in Arkansas are affording minorities opportunities to choose a school that best meets their children’s needs.