Arizona charter students perform below national average on Nation's Report Card test

Arizona charter school students are performing below the U.S. average, according to a first-of-its-kind report that examined charter school student test scores on a national assessment over a 10-year period.

The report, released Tuesday by Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, analyzed charter school student performance on the National Assessment for Educational Progress in 35 states and Washington, D.C.

The authors analyzed 145,730 math and reading results from NAEP tests administered to fourth and eighth-grade students from 2009 to 2019. The report marks the first time that charter school student performance has been compared across states using the NAEP, also known as the Nation's Report Card, according to the authors.

The NAEP is administered every two years by the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education, to a sample of students across the country to assess student progress and performance in core subject areas.

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"This is the only way you can really have an apples-to-apples comparison," said Paul Peterson, one of the report's authors. The test stays essentially the same over time.

The Harvard report excluded states with no charter schools or several tested charter school students insufficient for precise estimates. It only includes data until 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, student math and reading scores on the 2022 NAEP assessment dropped dramatically from the 2019 test, though reading scores held steady in Arizona.

According to the report, Arizona's average charter school student performance on NAEP was below the average of 22 other states. Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York had the highest average charter school student test scores. Hawaii, Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon and Pennsylvania had the lowest.

In Arizona, charter schools were created by the Legislature in 1994. The state has the second-highest share of public school students attending charter schools in the country, about 20%, according to National Center for Education Statistics data from 2021. The national average was 7%.

There are about 570 charter schools in Arizona, according to the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools.

The Harvard report found charter school "performance is not simply a function of the educational environment of the state as a whole," according to a statement from Education Next, the scholarly journal where the report's findings are published. The authors found a weak relationship between a state's rank based on average charter school student performance on NAEP and the state's rank based on the average NAEP performance of all public school students.

In Arizona, however, the charter school student achievement ranking was closely aligned with the student achievement ranking when taking into account all public schools. California's charter school student achievement ranking and the student achievement ranking for all public schools are similar to Arizona's, according to the report.

"If you know how the public schools are doing in Arizona, you'll pretty much know how the charter schools are doing there," Peterson said. "Relative to other states, they don't look much different from the ranking of the public schools."

The report found nationwide disparities in Black and Hispanic charter school student performance as compared to the performance of white charter school students.

In Arizona, the gap between the average test scores of Black and white charter school students is equal to about two and a half years of learning, according to the report. Still, compared to other states, Arizona had the second-lowest level of disparity for Black charter school student performance.

The gap between the average test scores of Hispanic and white charter school students in Arizona was even larger than the gap between Black and white charter school students.

The report also found that nationally, student performance is significantly lower at charter schools authorized by higher education institutions than at those authorized by state education agencies. In Arizona, the largest charter school authorizer is the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, but universities under the Arizona Board of Regents and community college districts can also authorize charter schools.

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In addition, the report found students who go to a charter school within a nonprofit network, as opposed to an independent or for-profit charter school, perform better on average on the NAEP.

Information about individual charter school performance is available on the Arizona Department of Education website and the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools website.

Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona charter students perform below national average on NAEP test