Paper: The Evolving Charter School Sector in North Carolina (2014 APPAM Fall Research Conference(November 5-8, 2014))

Thursday, November 6, 2014 : 10:35 AM

Enchantment I (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Helen Ladd¹, Charles Clotfelter¹ and Jacob Vigdor², (1)Duke University, (2)University of Washington

This empirical paper on charter schools will replicate for North Carolina as much as possible the empirical approach used in the Texas. Replications of this type are important given that individual states have their own authorizing practices and other policies for regulating charter schools, making it dangerous to generalize findings from one state to another without attention to what might explain differences across states. In addition, we will undertake a careful analysis of the probability that an individual charter school student returns to the charter school the following year (assuming of course that the charter offers the next grade). Although we will not be able to distinguish among the reasons for not returning (e.g parental preference vs the school’s view that the child is not a good fit), we can still infer from this analysis which types of students the charters appear to serve most successfully, and therefore to draw conclusions about the extent to which charter schools are meeting the goals of the state legislation.

As in Texas, the early charter schools in North Carolina were of variable quality and on average less effective than traditional public schools. Changes in state policy during the mid y 2000s (including delaying the opening of authorized charters for a year to increase the chances that new charters would be successful) should have narrowed the quality distribution over time but we do not yet know whether it did. With the removal of the state’s 100 school cap in 2011, and subsequent relaxation of regulations, many new charter schools have now opened and many more groups have applied for charters, leading to the possibility that the number of charter schools may soon reach 200. While it is too early to examine student outcomes for the many new charters, we plan to conduct a careful analysis of all charter school applications over time to examine trends in their mission statements, proposed locations, targeted students, and characteristics of boards (including, for example, the presence of members with experience in education or with a development background). Thus in addition to replicating the Texas analysis using data through 2012, we hope to extrapolate the NC trends into the future based on the trends in the applications.

Panel Paper: The Evolving Charter School Sector in North Carolina