Siphon or Solution?

New Alliance Research Deals With the Impact of Charters

The Alliance released new versions of two of its trademark research initiatives this week: Top 10 Charter Communities by Market Share: 2006-2007 and Charter School Achievement: What We Know (Fourth Edition).

Our Market Share piece outlines the "top ten" communities in which public charter schools are educating a high percentage of that community's students. (Accounting for ties, a total of 29 different communities have more than 13% of their students in charter schools.) The big news here is that 10 new communities have joined the list. Perhaps the most exciting addition is Philadelphia, a city with over 200,000 school children, in which 13% of those children attend charter schools. Ohio continues to lead the pack in terms of number of cities on the list, and you can read the Toledo Blade's take here.

On the achievement side, there's still a lot to learn, and we continue to believe that there must be greater emphasis on longitudinal studies that track the same students over time, in order to gauge the true impact of charter schooling. That said, most studies that track student progress over time demonstrate that charter schools produce greater gains than traditional public schools. Another huge message to take out of the achievement study is that we need to learn more about WHY some charter schools are vastly outperforming their traditional counterparts.

In terms of the question posed in the title of this post ... need we make the distinction? Despite the negative connotations of "siphon," which I lifted from the Toledo article, if most studies find that charter schools are allowing for greater student growth, this is a siphon we can be proud of.