Are Charter School Students Harder to Educate? Evidence From Washington, D.C.

Abstract

One point of debate in the recent controversy in the media and among policy analysts over the academic achievement of charter school students is whether the charter students are in some way harder to educate than their counterparts enrolled in traditional public schools. This article examines this question using data from the 2002–2003 school year in Washington, D.C. It begins by examining a simple binomial model of the proportion of students in key demographic and programmatic categories linked to educability. It then turns to the estimation of a more theoretically appropriate mixture model that assumes two latent categories of charter schools. It concludes with an analysis that moves beyond simple demographic/programmatic factors to consider measures of educability using individual-level survey data from charter and traditional public school students. Overall, there is mixed evidence of differences in the educability of students in the two sectors.