Do School Choice Programs Reduce Crime? Multiple Studies Say Yes!

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published here by the Washington Examiner, on July 2, 2019 and written by Corey A. DeAngelis, the Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support school choice, charter school growth, and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.

Yet Another Study Shows School Choice Programs Reduce Crime

Schools are expected to prepare children to become good citizens. They can help achieve this goal by producing a well-educated populace and promoting strong character. But not all school systems equally contribute to the public good. Indeed, the evidence shows school choice does more to cut crime than residentially-assigned public schools. Here are the facts.

Yet another study just came out revealing the crime-reducing benefits of school choice. Researchers found that entering a charter school in North Carolina in 9th grade reduced the rate at which students were convicted of felonies by 36% and the rate at which they were convicted of misdemeanors as adults by 38%, compared to their peers in traditional public schools.

But this isn’t the first study to show that school choice reduces crime. There are now six rigorous studies on the subject, and all six studies find that school choice cuts crime.

For example, a study by researchers at Harvard and Princeton found that winning a lottery to attend a charter school in New York City reduced the likelihood of incarceration for male students by 100%. That’s right. Winning a lottery to attend a charter school in NYC all-but completely eliminated the chance of incarceration for male students in the sample. But that’s not all — the study also found that winning a charter school lottery reduced teen pregnancy by 59% for female students.

Another study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that winning a lottery to attend a public school of choice cut crime in half, a 50% reduction, for high-risk male students in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Two studies — conducted by Dr. Patrick J. Wolf and I — similarly found that students using the Milwaukee voucher program to attend private schools were significantly less likely to commit crimes than their carefully matched peers in traditional public schools by the time they reached 22 to 28 years of age. The 2016 version is forthcoming at Social Science Quarterly.

But why does school choice reduce crime?

Traditional public schools hold significant monopoly power because of residential assignment and funding through property taxes. Families upset with the quality of their public school only have three limited options: They can purchase an expensive new house that is assigned to a better public school, pay for a private school out of pocket while still paying for the public school through property taxes, or complain to the school leaders and hope things change.

Because these options are expensive and inefficient, there is not a lot of pressure for residentially-assigned public schools to provide the best character education possible. In contrast, private and charter schools must cater to the needs of families if they wish to remain open.

School choice puts power into the hands of families. And families usually know what’s best for their own kids.

But competition isn’t the only explanation. School choice could also reduce crime by matching students to schools that interest them, and by exposing students to peer groups and school cultures that discourage risky behaviors.

So, it’s about time we rethink the notion that residentially-assigned public schools contribute most to the public good. After all, every single study on the topic finds that school choice does more to benefit society by reducing crime.

How the Charter-School Backlash Will Hurt American Kids

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published here, on June 21st, 2019 by New York Daily News and was written by Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The charter-school backlash will hurt kids across America

This graduation season, millions of students are celebrating as years of hard work finally pay off in high school diplomas and college degrees. But the feeling isn’t universal. For many students, graduation season is a reminder that they haven’t reached their goals. A combination of inadequate schools, limited economic circumstances and troubled social conditions drive students off track. Even for many high school graduates going on to college, the cruel reality is that, for those from the lowest-income families, they’re unlikely to graduate from college. The next few years may lead to more debt, but not more opportunity.

We should be incensed by this heartbreaking reality. We should be demanding solutions. Instead, political leaders, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, want to close off one of the few paths that lead disadvantaged students to college success.

The facts are laid out in a new book, “The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America.” Author Richard Whitmire identifies high schools that are helping students beat the college odds. Despite educating students from predominately low-income backgrounds, these schools are preparing students to graduate not just from high school but from college.

Whitmire shows that networks of charter schools — public, but independent of local bureaucracies and unions — are producing college graduates at a rate two to four times higher than the average for all students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. A few novel things are happening in charter schools to produce these positive outcomes.

One is that many charter schools instill a college-going mindset early. College banners line hallways and homerooms are named after colleges — even in elementary school. Students have their sights set on college and are continually told they have the power to reach their goal.

A second factor driving college success is that charter schools have continuous improvement in their DNA. Some of the most successful charter school networks found that they were getting students to college but that their students were struggling when they got there, undermined by the lack of support and supervision on campus. So these networks have put an emphasis on supporting students in college, for instance by extending the guidance relationship with students into college and by plugging graduates into alumni networks on campus.

A third factor is that charter schools are focusing more of their counseling on helping students find the right college fit for them. Historically black colleges and universities, smaller colleges, schools with strong alumni networks, schools closer to home or farther from home depending on the circumstances: Finding the right fit can make a huge difference for students who are the first in their family to go to college or who are from underrepresented backgrounds and report feeling isolated when they go to majority white and wealthy campuses.

Rich Buery, a former deputy mayor of New York City who now heads policy for KIPP, identifies college counseling as a major driver of KIPP’s successful efforts to help more alumni graduate from college. He notes that the average student-to-counselor ratio nationwide is 482 to 1 — and often higher in urban public high schools. It’s almost impossible for students to get the attention they need to identify schools where they can be successful, let alone apply to them and gain admission.

At KIPP, the average student-to-counselor ratio is 100 to 1. According to Buery, “This is a significant resource commitment and we have seen it pay off.” Forty-five percent of students who graduate from KIPP high schools graduate from college, compared to 11% of students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. One of the great benefits of charter schools is that they have more freedom to direct resources to areas where they see the greatest need, not necessarily where the district bureaucracy decides the money should be spent.

The college success rates for graduates of KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Yes Prep and others are reason to celebrate, to share new approaches with other schools, and to keep pressing until we close the college gap completely.

Unfortunately, the latest trend — from New York City to California and several places in between — has been to halt charter school growth. Sanders has even put charter-bashing at the center of his presidential campaign platform. He wants to make college free, but won’t support the schools that are making college accessible to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

It’s odd, to say the least, that some adults are more concerned with supporting bureaucracies than with supporting students — especially when there are millions of black and brown students who can’t even dream of college because their schools aren’t preparing them to get there, and when wealthy kids are six times more likely to graduate from college than poor kids.

Charter schools are making college success a real possibility for the 3.2 million students attending them today. Anybody truly committed to upending the status quo in our country and extending opportunity to more Americans should be asking how we can help more students access life-changing charter schools and feel the pride of college graduation.

Since the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We help schools access, leverage, and sustain the resources charter schools need to thrive, allowing them to focus on what matters most – educating students. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.8 billion in support of 600 charter schools that have educated over 1,027,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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CHARTER EDtalk: How to Prepare Your Charter School Students for College Readiness

In this CHARTER EDtalk, Charter School Capital Inside Sales Manager, Shannon Schrencengost had the pleasure of sitting down with Director of The Early College High School at Delaware State University, Evelyn Edney, to discuss how their school’s curriculum, programs, and staff help underrepresented charter school students become college-ready. Watch the video and read the complete transcript below to hear the whole story.

Shannon Schrencengost: Hi, I’m Shannon Schrencengost with Charter School Capital, and I’m here today with Evelyn Edney from the Early College High School in Delaware. We’re going to be chatting a bit about college readiness. So Evelyn, tell me little bit about what Early College High School is doing to measure college readiness.

Evelyn Edney: So, we are a very small charter school, and we are affiliated with Delaware State University. The whole premise of our school is to allow underrepresented youth to have kind of get a leg up and be able to start taking college classes while they’re in high school. So, we needed to come up with a way to determine who gets to take the college classes and when, because we want to make sure that they’re ready. Most tools out there are always looking at things like just SAT scores, or just this. And I created a tool that allows us to look at the whole student to be able to gauge how well they’re doing and to give students points to say, “Hey, here’s where I can improve.” And that sort of thing.

So, our college readiness rubric measures the categories that we thought went into college readiness. Of course grades. We need to see that our students are able to do college level work. Their attendance, because college professors care if you show up. And we look at their behavior. If you’re a student who knows that I have a bathroom in my office, you’ve been in there too many times, and maybe you’re not quite ready to be sitting in a college classroom taking college classes just yet. And we look at how well students do on bigger assessments. We have some school level assessments, we have some common assessments through grade levels, we have some state level assessments. And so, we look at those assessments in conjunction with the other things. And then we also ask our teachers to recommend the students. So, those are the five factors that kind of go into our college readiness rubric.

Now, it sounds like we’re just looking to measure the college readiness, and we are, it works in our particular situation, but this tool can be something that anybody could tweak and then make it their own to measure something that may be a priority in their schools.

Schrecengost: What personally motivates you in working with the school that has a mission and vision college readiness and the college going mindset?

Edney: Well, growing up I would have been one of those underrepresented students, and had I not had some educators in the school that I was in work with me to be able to get to a point where I could do college level work and to help me actually get there, I don’t think I would have made it and I might be a different kind of statistic right now than the one that I am. So, that personal story keeps me motivated to want to help other students who may be in the same boat.

Schrecengost: I’d love to hear some kind of success stories. Students who’ve gone on to college and what they’re doing now.

Edney: Well, our school is small and it did just start a few years ago. So, we just graduated our first class, the class of 2018 last year. And the valedictorian went to Stanford on a free ride. The salutatorian went to University of Pennsylvania on a free ride. And a lot of the other students went to other smatterings of school, but the majority of them went to Delaware State University, the school who started at all with us. And so, that makes me excited to now see the students on campus. When I was their high school principal, they tried to run from me when they saw me on campus, but now they’re freshmen in college, but with credits. A lot of those students started at Delaware State University as a first year student, but they’re coming in with almost over a year and some of them up to two years worth of college credits under their belts to kind of keep them going. And so, that’s exciting to us.

Schrecengost: That’s very exciting. I think, there’s a lot of national conversation around college debt right now. So, thinking of the savings for those students, I’m jealous. I wish I had done a program like that when I was in high school, so that’s really neat.

Edney: A lot of adults say the same things. A lot of the parents of these students, they get it. Not all of the students are all wanting and willing to go to an early college program. I think some of their parents kind of drag them by the ear, but because they know what the opportunity involves. And our partner at Delaware State University is phenomenal. I mean we would not be able to do what we do. They literally provide a building for us to be in tuition free for our students. This high school pays for the student’s books, and so this whole track for our students, it’s free. And so, it really helps them get that leg up, and most of them are going to graduate from college in literally a year, almost two years earlier than their peers in other schools.

Schrecengost: I know there’s a significant amount of work that goes into building a charter school. What did that feel like for you when you saw that first round of graduates walk across that stage?

Edney: That was an exciting moment for me. I was very excited, and our legislators are very, very supportive. Our Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester was our keynote speaker that evening, and Senator Carper, Thomas Carper, he came up through a monsoon in Washington and they weren’t in session just to attend to our graduation. And so, that made us kind of excited that we had people who were supporting us. And it is hard.

You must have that kind of support in going through, and again and I mentioned Delaware State University as being a partner, they’re not only a partner in things like the tuition or the building they provide us, but their professors will create opportunities for our students to kind of experience going into their labs and working alongside of real college students to be able to show students another side of things that they would want to kind of pursue.

Schrecengost: What do you think other charters who might want to start doing dual college programming, want to implement that, what advice do you have for them?

Edney: To sit down and look at what factors they believe go into college readiness, and figure out a way to put that onus on the students and give them a tool that helps them measure where they are, and set goals on where they want to be so that they can do well in a program like ours.

Schrecengost: All right, everyone. How do you ensure that you’re meeting the needs of all students to ensure that they’re college ready?

Edney: Well, the way our rubric works, it measures the student’s college readiness eight times a year so that it coincides with grade reporting. When we get back these really great reports that we use, working through Performance Plus Power School, we are able to look at the rubric and the report and on it we can kind of see the student’s score. And if it’s at a score that kind of deems them not quite college ready, but more at potential, we look at what the factors are and based off of their score, we kind of create a system of supporting the student.

One layer could be for the students who are most needy, I usually will personally meet with them or my assistant principal. We sit down, have a meeting with myself, the school counselor, that parent, that student and we map out kind of a plan of success. Whether we put supports in place like get them a tutor, have them use resources at the college that we’re affiliated with. We also have an after school extra help program, but we put supports in place around the subject area or the factors that they need help in the most. And then we try to map out that plan and then we check on it periodically to see that they’re doing. A student’s score may yield that they meet with their advisor. Each student has an advisor and that advisor advisee relationship’s really important in our school. And so they sit with them and meet with them and do kind of the same thing that we’re doing, but it’s kind of done with their advisor.

We use that to kind of put those supports in place so that those students can reach that and be able to do the college courses.

Schrecengost: Got it. And tell me about your relationship with key community stakeholders and ensuring that they’re bought into the college going vision.

Edney: It’s not hard to sell it because a lot of businesses as well as our immediate school stakeholders, like our parents are very involved. We try to streamline this whole college readiness program in everything that we do. For instance, our positive behavior support program, horn at pride, catch it. That’s a big thing. If you walk up to one of my students and say that, they will say that back to you. But we take that and we look for a way the students who are deemed college ready, we want to make sure even though we have a plan to put in place for those students who don’t quite make it each time that we’re doing, for the students who do, we want to celebrate it.

We try to do some celebrations every single month to celebrate the students who are there. And the PTSA will sponsor one or two. They sponsored a skating party or we get stakeholders in the community to maybe sponsor a, what we would call dinner and a movie and we would show movie at school and they sponsor a dinner there. Or we take the students to the movies and so forth. We try to bring the community in that way. We also create field trips that are educationally sound, and so the students may be able to go to one of the field trips that are sponsored by the university and community members.

Schrecengost: That’s great. It sounds like you have a lot of support and that’s fantastic.

Edney: We do. It’s really great.

Schrecengost: Awesome. What am I not asking that you want people to know about your school?

Edney: It’s great. I love going there every single day. It’s been wonderful and hard at the same time. Everyone knows in little tiny charter schools you all have to wear a million hats, and I am lucky enough to have a staff who really believes in our model, and that they will go over to our wall of invisible hats and grab whatever one’s needed to make sure that these students are succeeding. And really trying to work, let that be our mission every single day.

Schrecengost: Thank you Evelyn. I appreciate you taking the time with me.

Edney: Thank you.

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Desert Star Academy Realizes Incredible Growth and a New Facility!

Desert Star Academy is a pre-K through 8th grade charter school in Fort Mohave, Arizona and run by its dedicated founder and director, Margie Montgomery. Their mission is to create academic scholars, citizens, and productive community leaders. Their experienced, passionate teaching staff focuses on providing rigor in the classroom and creating a culture of building confidence in their scholars as the foundation for learning and growth. Their inspiring culture, curriculum, and proven academic success are just a few reasons for their astronomical year-over-year growth from 62 students in 2014 to over 450 scholars expected this year.

CHALLENGES

In the beginning, they had very little capital to get started, purchase curriculum, furnishings, and cover operational expenses.
With true-ups in November and expected increases in students each year, they were continually facing significant budget gaps
Their incredible rise in enrollment after their first year resulted in Desert Star Academy quickly outgrowing their space.
Desert Star Academy not only needed a new middle school facility, but the capital to support the education of their scholars.

SOLUTION

To get the school up and running, Charter School Capital helped provide the capital needed to cover expenses.
To bridge funding gaps, Charter School Capital purchases payments due to Desert Star Academy and provides the funds they need in advance of state payment distribution dates
To address their facilities needs, Charter School Capital bought land in 2016, completed construction on a new middle school in 2017, and provided a long-term lease to the school as well as capital for curriculum, technology, and furnishings.

“Charter School Capital is highly vested in our school’s success and the support is great! They helped me become a better business manager and I can honestly say that we wouldn’t be where we are today without the support of Charter School Capital.” -Margie Montgomery, Founder & Director, Desert Star Academy

THE RESULT

The funding and facilities support provided by Charter School Capital helped facilitate Desert Star Academy’s continued impressive growth. It enabled them to increase enrollment; hire new staff; purchase materials, technology, and curriculum; acquire new furniture; cover basic operational costs; and importantly, add a needed middle school campus. Executive Director, Margie Montgomery, the life force behind Desert Star’s achievements, is looking toward their future. In addition to her dream of building a gym and several additional classrooms for her scholars, she is working closely with Charter School Capital on a plan for the school to become financially independent while continuing their growth trajectory.

You can download the PDF of this School Spotlight here.

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Charter School Security: Keys to Preventing School Violence

In this CHARTER EDtalk, Janet Johnson, Charter School Capital’s Chief Growth Officer, had the honor of sitting down with school safety expert, Gary Sigrist, President and CEO, Safeguard Risk Solutions.

Gary Sigrist is a nationally known speaker, consultant, author and expert on emergency preparedness. His career spans more than 30 years as an educator, administrator and police officer. Sigrist’s background in both education and law enforcement gives him a unique perspective on safety and preparedness, which he brings to his work with clients of Safeguard Risk Solutions.

We were so pleased that Gary took some time to share his insights and some simple tips on how to build a positive school culture and how that can, in turn, help prevent school violence. Watch the video and read the complete transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Janet Johnson: Good day. This is Janet Johnson. I’m with Charter School Capital and we’re fortunate enough to be here today with Gary Sigrist from Safeguard Risk Solutions, talking about a pretty topical subject that can be a little bit nerve-wracking, which is school security.

Gary Sigrist: Yes. Good morning.

Johnson: Good morning and thank you for joining us.

Sigrist: Glad to be here.

Johnson: We really appreciate it. We thought we’d talk a little bit about school security and frankly, I think the question that most people really want to know is how do we prevent issues from happening?

Sigrist: So there’s a wide range of things you can do, and almost all of them are inexpensive, which is important. It’s the prevention aspect. In the United States, we spend about $6 billion a year on school safety and security, and most of it is response. Whereas with prevention, if you’re in the response phase, you’re already that school. Okay. So if we’re in the prevention phase, it’ll never happen. You’ll never get that negative recognition.

And prevention as everything from a positive school culture to having threat assessment teams, to just making sure that all of your students are engaged in your school. And that more than anything, that engagement where they feel like they belong, will prevent them from doing things because they want to get back at someone. Or they’re on a pathway to justification that it’s okay that I do this to you because you did this to me, or a pathway to violence. So, in that prevention phase, you keep that student engaged in the school because then they don’t want to harm the school or anybody in it because they belong to that school.

Johnson: And so when you are on this path to prevention through the students, that’s teachers, right? Are you talking about teachers, mostly?

Sigrist: It is going to have to be driven actually from the administrators who are creating that positive school climate with their staff. Because it’s not just teachers. It’s cooks, it’s custodians, it’s the secretary, it’s everybody who creates this positive school climate where … there’s never going to be a day where a student is going to say, “Yippity, I get to come to school today.” But you don’t want them to get up in the morning and say, “Oh my God, I don’t know if I can take another day there.”

So if they are engaged with the school, because every adult in that building sees and smiles, welcomes them, and creates that positive “I’m glad you’re here” feeling, that’s going to help reduce it. We’re also going to have to make sure that there’s no culture of bullying. Where kids know that they feel accepted.

When you talk about this pathway of violence, pathway of justification, it’s a dynamic process. A child may actually be on a pathway, but if you intervene, help that child change their circumstances, they get off that pathway. So you can control what happens in your school simply by controlling the culture of your school.

Johnson: So how do you establish the positive culture?

Sigrist: Well, one of the things that I think is so easy is during class changes, when you’re talking about middle school and high school, because that’s when your most likely offender is going to be out, teachers should be out in the hallway. And they’re out in the hallway for a lot of reasons. One is they can manage the students. If they see bullying behavior, they can stop it. If they see behavior that’s not acceptable, they can stop it.

But they can also engage the students as they see them in the hallway. “Hi, how are you doing? Nice job on your math test. Really liked you in the play yesterday. Looking forward to the school concert.” All those things that make the students feel like they belong. And they set the tone for that positive school climate.

We know that children are less likely to make a mistake if they have a caring adult in their home, their neighborhood, their church or their school. And so the school is a very big part of that, of making that child feel like they belong and they’re part of the school.

Johnson: So sometimes just a smile and a comment.

Yet positive school climate is the least expensive and the most effective thing you could do to keep your students and staff safe.

Sigrist: Just a smile, and the thing is, money is tight in every school. Yet positive school climate is the least expensive and the most effective thing you could do to keep your students and staff safe.

Johnson: Are there resources that you would recommend for school leaders to look at, establishing this positive climate that are accessible to folks?

Sigrist: There are thousands of resources online. One of my favorite resources is the United States Department of Education and the REMS Technical Assistance Center, the REMS TA center. They have everything that you might consider for helping your school remain safe, and all of those resources are free, which is huge. They’ll even come out and do free training.

Johnson: Really?

Sigrist: So it’s the REMS TA center. You just Google REMS, Readiness and Emergency Management Schools TA, technical assistance center, and you’ll pop up with blogs that you can go to. There are exercises, there are memorandums of understanding it, everything they lay out for what schools need to be safe. They have emergency operation plans that are free, that almost every state requires. So to me, if you’re looking for free resources that have the backing of the United States Department of Education, the REMS technical center is the place to go.

Johnson: That’s the place. And we will post the link to that in our blog. So please visit us and take a look at that. So positive school culture. Let’s talk about preventing bullying a little bit if you don’t mind.

Sigrist: You know, that’s, unfortunately, one of the areas we have to look for bullying first is within our staff.

Johnson: Really?

Sigrist: I can see a lot of that kind of behavior. I hear a lot of that behavior where teachers bully or are not being kind to each other. And your students will model that behavior. So-

Johnson: That’s a surprise to me.

Sigrist: Statistically 20, I always, when I’m giving a presentation, I’ll ask how many people have been bullied when they were in school? A lot of people raise their hand. And I say, where are those bullies now? And statistically, 25% are in prison or jail. So where are the other 75%? They’re in the workplace. And so if you don’t address that behavior, if staff members were being negative towards each other, then as an administrator, you’re going to have to address that because that’s unacceptable behavior.

And I’ve seen in my teaching career, teachers throw other teachers, for lack of a better word, under the bus in front of the students.

Johnson: Really?

Sigrist: And so the students say, “Well, if it’s okay for that teacher to pick on that teacher, why is it not okay for me to pick on that student?” So modeling that positive behavior of what you want to see.

Johnson: Wow. I’m surprised.

Sigrist: Most people are.

Johnson: No kidding. Are there any other just quick hints in terms of the positive school culture and climate?

Sigrist: No. I think it’s just an easy thing. You set up methods to recognize your students whenever they do well, and you reward them for doing good things.

Johnson: That’s right. That’s fabulous. Gary, thank you so much.

Sigrist: You’re welcome.

Johnson: Appreciate it.

Sigrist: Alrighty.

To learn more about school safety and security, check out this webinar-on-demand. In it, we cover important topics around safety and security for schools, specifically looking at security challenges in charter schools. Access the slides and recording of this webinar to learn about school safety measures, emergency planning, threat assessment, and more.

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Charter Schools Are Getting Results

Editor’s Note: This article on charter school results was initially published here on May 15, 2019 by The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and written by Nathan Barrett, Ph.D., the Senior Director, Research and Evaluation at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Charter Schools Are Getting Results

The charter school sector has much to celebrate.

In an education system that has been equally quick to end reforms as it is to introduce them, for over 25 years the charter sector has seen significant growth. This is due in no small part to the fact that parents want charter schools as an option for their children because charter schools, on average, generate positive results for their students.

Measured by improvement on test outcomes, study after study across methods and samples, has shown that the average student in a public charter school experiences equal or higher achievement growth in English and/or math than that of a district school peer (more on research methodology) This is true for “gold-standard” randomized-assignment designs (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.) and for quasi-experimental designs (here, here, here, here, etc.). Research has also demonstrated that charter schools perform well with traditionally underserved student populations. For example, a recent study found that Black students in charter schools gained an additional 89 days of learning in math.

To be clear, these are average effects on test-scores. There is certainly variance among charter schools in their ability to affect student outcomes with some schools performing below expectations. However, part of the charter school sector model is addressing these failures and closing schools that fail to perform. Indeed, there is research (here and here) suggesting that some of the positive effects we see from the charter sector are due to school closures. This research suggests the importance of looking at the charter sector over time, so the mechanisms of accountability can have time to influence the composition of the charter school sector. Perhaps even more important is research on policy implementation that suggests the importance of giving enough time for policies to develop and improve as implementation is better understood. This is evident in studies of Texas and North Carolina. These studies find that, over time, the charter sector improved to a point that students enrolled in charter schools, on average, outperformed their traditional school counterparts. The authors caution that this effect could be due to student sorting patterns. However, thoughtful treatment of these assumptions suggest that it is unlikely that student sorting accounts for the entirety of the effects and encourages further work on the matter.

The use of test scores to measure performance is a factor of both convenience and an assumption that test scores are related to attainment. Indeed, some of the best research available has demonstrated a strong relationship between test scores and longer-term outcomes such as graduation and early-career earnings. However, there is also evidence of schools influencing attainment outcomes without influencing test scores and vice versa. Because we are ultimately interested in longer-term outcomes for our students, the research base evaluating these outcomes has grown over the past decade. This is largely because as the charter school movement ages, we can track students through high school, college, and career, but also due to better data systems allowing researchers to follow students through these transitions. Research has shown that students attending charter schools are more likely to graduate from high school (7-11% higher), attend and persist in college (10-11% and 6-13% higher, respectively), and have higher future earnings (over 12% higher). Studies have also found that female students are less likely to become pregnant in their teens, male students are less likely to be incarcerated, and students are less likely to be absent.

It is certainly worth noting that these outcomes are driven by charter schools that, on average, receive 20-40% less funding than their traditional school counterparts. These figures are even more striking when one considers that 18 states pay for the pension system before allocating funds to schools, charter schools typically must pay for facilities expenses through their operating budget, and many states have hold harmless policies that subsidize districts for students that move to a charter school. A recent study of the charter sectors in eight cities confirms the funding inequity and found that charter schools are more cost-effective and provide a larger return-on-investment than their traditional school counterparts. Though caution should be used about making linear assumption between increasing funding and student outcomes, the findings still suggest that even at lower funding levels, charter schools are delivering on their commitment to better serving their students.

Taken together, it is easy to say that, on average, charter schools are doing what they set out to do—improving educational opportunities for students. This is evidenced by the myriad of studies finding positive effects on outcomes from test-scores to future-earnings, all while operating with fewer resources. If that wasn’t enough, we estimate that there are approximately 5 million students who would attend a charter school if one was available.

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Announcing our 3rd Annual Charter School Capital Dewey Awards!

Most of us have had teachers, or at least one, that made significant impact on our lives. For our President and CEO, Stuart Ellis, that teacher was Mr. Dewey. In 2017, and in honor of Richard Dewey, we created the Dewey Awards to celebrate those teachers who were able to see in us what we perhaps couldn’t see, who saw our promise and potential, and made us believe that we could do anything we set our minds to.

This year, the awards are even more poignant for us as we continue to honor and celebrate the life of Mr. Dewey following his passing this year. We are so proud to pay homage to the positive impact he made on Stuart and surely countless other students throughout his career.

For this, our 3rd Annual Dewey Awards, we hope you can help us honor outstanding educators who are making a difference in the lives of their students—in Richard Dewey’s name.

The past two years, we asked you to send in your Stories of Inspiration and we were truly moved by the beautiful tributes to impactful educators from across the country. If you missed it last year, we asked Stuart to share what the awards mean to him and learn a bit more about what the impetus was for starting this program. Watch the video and read Stuart’s story below.

Video Transcript:

We asked Stuart Ellis, “What was the impetus for The Dewey Awards?”

Initially, last year we were celebrating our 10th anniversary at Charter School Capital and the work we’ve been doing with charter schools. The Dewey Awards came out of the inspirational teacher that changed the trajectory of my life back in third grade at Welby Way Elementary School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Richard Dewey was my teacher and he fundamentally changed the way I thought about myself. He made me feel loved as a third grader and really made me believe that I could do anything in life.

As we approached the 10th anniversary of Charter School Capital, I began to think about the difference that a Charter School makes in a child’s life and thinking back to my own experience in public school. I realized that it’s actually about the connection with the teachers that an individual child has. And those inspirational teachers who really can see each child and student for who they are, make them feel loved, bring out that potential, and instill the belief in them that they can achieve anything. Let them know that they can simply be who they are and that that is good—don’t change, just be you.

I thought, how can we celebrate this, the impact that teachers have on each of our lives? I talked with people around the company a little bit as I told my story of my teacher, Richard Dewey. When I shared my story, everybody immediately had that one teacher. It’s not that they had 10, even though we’ve all had many, many mentors and teachers. Every adult I talked to could think back and they can see that one inspirational teacher that really changed everything for them.

It was amazing to actually hear other people’s stories just flow out when I shared mine. And I think that was the beginning of the Dewey Awards. We did it last year for the first time and it generated such an outpouring of inspirational letters from others in the community and the charter school community that as we came into this year, even though we were just doing it for our tenth anniversary, we should just do it again.”

So doing it again, we are!

Have you had a teacher who made a positive difference in your life? If so, share your story with us for the opportunity to receive one of three 2019 $1,000 grants to be awarded to a charter school of your choice! See the details below to honor your most influential teacher. #WeLoveCharterSchools

Submit your story here:

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School Choice FAQs

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published here by the Center for Education Reform. We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support school choice, charter school growth, and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.

JUST THE FAQS—SCHOOL CHOICE

The following are answers to some frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding school choice and what choice means for students, parents, educators, schools and communities. The answers to these FAQs are intended to provide only an introductory overview of key school choice issues. Links with additional information are provided for those who are interested in learning more.

What Does School Choice Mean?

The term “school choice” means giving parents the power and opportunity to choose the schools their children attend. Traditionally, children are assigned to a public school according to where they live. People of greater economic means already have school choice, because they can afford to move to an area with high quality public schools, or to enroll their children in private schools. Parents without such means, until recently, generally had no school choices, and had to send their children to the schools assigned to them by the district, regardless of the schools’ quality or appropriateness for their children.

School choice creates better educational opportunities for all students, because it uses the dynamics of consumer opportunity and provider competition to drive service quality. This principle can be found anywhere you look, from cars to colleges, but it’s largely absent in our public school system and the poor results are evident, especially in the centers of American culture – our cities. School choice programs foster parental involvement and high expectations by giving parents the option to educate their children as they see fit. It reasserts the rights of parents and the best interests of children over the convenience of the system, infuses accountability and quality into the system, and provides educational opportunity where none existed before.

What Kinds of School Choice Exist Today?

• Full school choice programs, also known as tuition vouchers, provide parents with a portion of the public educational funding allotted for their child to attend school, and allows them to use those funds to send their child to the school of their choice. It gives them the fiscal authority to send their child to the educational institution that best suits their need, whether it is a religious or parochial school, another private school, or a neighborhood or magnet public school. These programs empower the family and, in so doing, infuse consumer accountability into the traditional public school system. Twenty-one voucher programs serve 115,580 students across the country, and several states offer choice scholarship programs specifically for students with special needs.

Access to full school choice programs is often restricted based on geography and income. Although most programs require residency in the district to qualify for vouchers, expanding numbers of statewide programs offer more flexibility. Many programs also have restrictions on income. For instance, the Milwaukee voucher program only offers scholarships to families below 300% of the poverty line.

• Private scholarship programs, locally based and privately funded, also provide opportunities for quality education where none existed before by making the excellence of the private sector available to families of lower socio-economic status. A non-comprehensive list of available private scholarships can be found here.

For more information about and links to voucher and individual scholarship programs, check out School Choice Programs Across the Nation.

• Charter schools are public schools that provide unique educational services to students, or deliver services in ways that the traditional public schools do not offer. They provide an alternative to the cookie-cutter district school model. Charters survive — and succeed — because they operate on the principles of choice, accountability and autonomy not readily found in traditional public schools. (See Just the FAQs – Charter Schools.) Find a charter school and join the nearly 3 million students who have chosen to attend one of the more than 6,500 charter schools in the United States.

• Public School Choice: Forty-six states and DC have adopted public school choice, which allows parents to enroll their children at any public school in a district, or in some cases, in other districts.

• Tuition Tax Credits and Deductions: A number of states offer support of parental school choice through various tax credit or deduction processes. For more information on tax credit scholarship programs visit Tax Credit FAQ.

• Education Savings Accounts (ESAs): A handful of states offer ESAs, which take a child’s state education dollars and create an individual education account that parents can use as they see fit to cover private school tuition, textbooks, tutors, or a variety of education-related expenses as deemed applicable by each individual state law. Arizona was the first state to enact an Education Savings Account program.

A Matter of History

Publicly-Sponsored Secular School Choice (2), Maine; Vermont

The longest running, and least controversial, full school choice program is in Vermont. In order to meet the demand of parents who live in towns too small to support a local public school, the state pays the tuition expenses for children to attend any public or non-sectarian private school (including schools outside the state). Vermont’s initial tuition statute, adopted in 1869 to ensure that both urban and rural school children could receive a quality secondary education, did not distinguish between religious and secular schools. In 1961, a court ruling banned religious schools from participating. The citizens and school board of Chittenden attempted to challenge the ban, but in 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court upheld the ban on religious schools under the Vermont constitution’s “compelled support” clause.

Maine’s tuition system has existed in some form for well over 200 years. During colonial years, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, many towns provided for the education of their residents by paying tuition for students to attend “private tuition schools,” many of which were operated by religious organizations. As the public education system grew, it became apparent that many of the state’s rural towns could not afford to build high schools, and so a tuition system was developed that paid the child’s tuition to any school of the parent’s choosing, in-state or out-of-state. But in 1980, the department of education ruled out religiously affiliated schools in towns that have public high schools, limiting many of the traditional choices for quality education that Maine families once exercised. On April 23, 1999, the Maine Supreme Court ruled that the ban on religious schools is not unconstitutional, but did not say whether the inclusion of religious schools would be unconstitutional. The decision does not support the right of parents to send their children to a religious institution and receive a tuition reimbursement. In November of 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Do School Choice Programs Work?

Yes. While most of the programs in question are young, evidence suggests that they provide educational opportunity to those that need it most.

One choice success story comes from the largest and longest running voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Students in this program tested 9 to 12 percent higher in math, reading and science than their equally disadvantaged peers. Students also graduated at an 18 percent higher rate. The District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) is another school choice success. A 2010 study from the Institute of Education Sciences found that students who were awarded a scholarship graduated from high school at a 12 percent higher rate than those who applied for the scholarship lottery but did not receive it.

Don’t Choice Programs Just “Cream” the Best Students?

Skeptics often argue that school choice programs only succeed because they “cream” the best students, those with the most involved parents or the best academic talents, and leave the hard-to-educate behind in the troubled traditional public school system. By measurements of student academic progress, parental involvement, constituent satisfaction and public school reaction to competition, the above mentioned studies show that choice programs do not succeed by “creaming,” but by providing quality education to all students. Consider:

•  While a third of traditional district public school students nationally are minorities, more than half of charter school students are minorities and 14 percent have identified special needs.

• Established choice scholarship programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee target at-risk children, exclusively from low-income families.

• The older programs in Vermont and Maine provide schooling in rural locations where public schooling was unavailable.

• Private scholarship programs specifically target low-income, at-risk children.

School choice does not “cream;” rather, it allows parents of at-risk children to choose the schooling that best suits their child’s educational and emotional needs, and in many cases parents are able to explore schooling alternatives before their child’s problems become too severe.

Don’t These Programs Just Subsidize the Tuition of Rich People and Leave the Poor Behind?

School choice programs are aimed at serving those least served by the traditional public school system. The two modern programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland help poor and needy children. In Cleveland, students from low-income families receive larger scholarships. 6,377 students participated in the program in the 2013-14 school year, and vouchers can be worth as much as $4,250 per elementary school student, and $5,700 for students in high school. Priority is determined by family income; the student’s family income must be below 200 percent of the poverty line. Low-income students also have a better chance of winning the initial lottery. Because this lottery received considerable attention by the local press, low-income families were more likely to find out that they had won a scholarship.

In Milwaukee, eligibility is limited to Milwaukee families with incomes at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level. Though more students are eligible, 24,938 students participated in Milwaukee’s voucher program in the 2013-14 school year, receiving an average voucher of $6,442. The original program’s participation was limited to 1.0 percent of MPS enrollment, but the cap has since been removed.

Research Continues to Show Success and Satisfaction

In Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts After Three Years, (March 2009) researchers Patrick Wolf, Babette Gutmann, Michael Puma, Brian Kisida, Lou Rizzo, Nada Eissa, and Marsha Silverbrg, found:

• Across the full sample, there was a statistically significant impact on reading achievement from the offer of a scholarship and from the use of a scholarship. These impacts are equivalent to 3.1 and 3.7 months of additional learning, respectively. However, there was no significant impact on math achievement.

• Parents of students offered a scholarship were more likely to report their child’s school to be safer and have a more orderly school climate compared to parents of students not offered a scholarship.

• The scholarship program had a positive impact on parent satisfaction with their child’s school as measured by the likelihood of grading the school an “A” or “B,” both for the impact of a scholarship offer and the impact of scholarship use.

School choice programs have become more common, especially in 2011, when 13 states passed voucher programs and almost 30 more have legislation pending. Indiana passed a voucher bill that has the broadest base of eligibility of any program to date, with no cap on participation by 2013. Vouchers have shown success and are poised to become more and more common in the coming years.

Voucher programs are expanding, but special education still receives priority: The John M. McKay Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Program, put into statewide practice in 2000, provided vouchers to 27,040 students with disabilities in 2013-14 with a total expenditure of $168,890,916.. These students are most in need and receive more direct assistance.

Are Choice Scholarships Programs Constitutional?

The strongest critics of choice scholarship programs claim that they violate the First Amendment (establishment of religion) if dollars are used for religiously affiliated schools. The First Amendment provides freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Choice scholarship programs let parents choose where to direct their children’s education funds. The state is not imposing religion upon its citizens (a concern of the Founding Fathers), nor does offering parents the choice of a religious education for their children substantiate federal funding of religious institutions. As Clint Bolick, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute observes:

All credible contemporary school choice proposals are constitutional.[Contemporary school choice programs] do not propose subsidizing religious schools, but merely include such schools within the range of educational options made available to a neutrally defined category of beneficiaries (usually economically disadvantaged families). No public funds are transmitted to religious schools except by the independent decisions of third parties. As the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has affirmed, such “attenuated financial benefit[s], ultimately controlled by the private choices of individual[s]“…are simply not within the contemplation of the Establishment Clause’s broad prohibition.

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Cleveland, Ohio school choice program, ensuring that laws returning parental stewardship of state educational funds for their children will not be overturned at the federal level.

Wouldn’t it Be Better To Put More Money Into the Existing School System Instead?

The “money issue” is politically charged and requires careful consideration and clarification. Many fiscal issues, from labor contracts to program mandates, are more a function of larger systemic barriers than of money, so increasing or tinkering with funding will likely do nothing to resolve perpetually mediocre education systems. In the last few decades, spending on K-12 public education has grown substantially without improving academic achievement. Expenditures have increased from $162 billion in 1982 to nearly $543 billion in the 2009-10 school year. The United States spent a higher percentage of its GDP on education than Italy, France Hong Kong, Canada, the Netherlands, or the UK in 2007 (the last year that official data is available).

Meanwhile, national indicators of academic progress have been disappointing. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores have shown little overall improvement for students aged 17 since 1971. According to the 2012 PISA report, students in the U.S. scored only in the “average” category in reading, below countries like Finland, Canada, Japan, and Poland. In science categories, the U.S. is trailing Slovenia. Twenty-seven countries outperformed the U.S. in science literacy. Thirty-five jurisdictions outperformed the U.S. in mathematics. Twenty-three jurisdictions outperformed the U.S. in reading. Eighteen countries outperformed the U.S. in all three subjects. While money is important, America’s educational performance over the last few decades shows that “more money” is not the solution to our nation’s educational problems.

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CHARTER EDtalk: The State of Florida Charter Schools

We wanted to check in on the state of Florida charter schools, so in this CHARTER EDtalk, Matthew Gardner, Charter School Capital Client Service Representative, had the privilege of sitting down with Larry Williams, Owner and Managing Partner at Larry Williams Consulting, LLC. Larry shares his expert insights on the state of Florida Charter Schools including their history and growth trajectories, performance rankings, obstacles they’re facing, and what the future looks like for charter schools in Florida.

To learn more about the state of Florida’s charter schools, please watch the video below or read the complete transcript below.

Matthew Gardner: Hello there, and thank you for joining us for this episode of Charter Ed Talks. I’m Matthew Gardner at Charter School Capital, and today we’re honored to be joined by Larry Williams to discuss the state of charter schools in sunny Florida.

So thank you for joining us, and we’re going to go ahead and just jump right in and kick things off.

So, Larry, taking the temperature of Florida, when did charter schools first appear on Florida’s educational landscape?

Larry Williams: The first charter school law for Florida was passed in 1996, which was also the same year that the first charter school opened, which was in Liberty City in the Miami area.

Actually, a group of parents there, in partnership with the future Florida governor Jeb Bush, opened that charter school in Florida. So that became the first charter school.

After that, then charter schools continued to grow. Somewhat at a slow pace there, but that was the very first one, the same year as the first charter school law was passed.

Gardner: Excellent, excellent. Thank you. What’s been the path of charter school growth since first being introduced in the state?

Williams: The charter school growth in Florida over the course of time, from 1996 to present, has been very good. From 1996 to probably 2012, 2014, that time frame there, almost a rocket pace. I mean, very steep growth rate.

Since then, over the last several years, we continue to see charter schools open. However, the rate of growth has slowed down somewhat, so we’re not seeing as many charter schools open every year. Net positive, though. We’re still seeing more charter schools open than we are seeing closed.

Gardner: Okay.

Williams: So, overall, our growth rate has gone down, but we still have significant numbers. We’re probably the third largest state. Well, we’re the third largest state, population. We have the third largest total of charter schools – over 660 charter schools servicing about 295,000 students in the state of Florida.

Gardner: Right. Wow. Excellent. How would you say the Florida charter school performance ranks with charter schools in other states?

Williams: They’re probably right around … probably very similar to their ranking with the National Charter School Alliance data on the model laws, right around number seven. So they’re in the top ten. So their performance is within top ten of other charter schools in the country.

Washington, D.C. pretty much leads the nation, but certainly with more charter schools, then we have a lot more accountability issues that we have to deal with.

Gardner: Right.

Williams: We can talk about some particular problems there. But, overall, about number six or number seven, compared to other schools in the country.

Gardner: That’s great. What do you feel is the biggest obstacle for new charter schools opening in the state?

Williams: Very interesting. If you listened to Nina Rees’s comments [at the National Charter Schools Conference] about how first people ignore you, then they’ll make fun of you, then they’ll try to brush you away, then they start fighting you, and then you try to win, we are now at a stage where we’re, in the charter school environment, having to take on the traditional public schools, the teachers’ unions, and others.

Gardner: Right.

Williams: Very, very serious. They put significant money, put significant resources behind advocating for traditional schools, as opposed to charters – not just allowing charters to be part of their portfolios, but, actually, it’s an us against them, more so than we’ve ever seen.

So that’s a very big obstacle. Another obstacle is the folks that they’re advocating to – traditionally those that are on the left side of the aisle, where you would think that those folks would be more supportive of charter schools, particularly into the student population that these folks generally represent.

But it’s not. It’s definitely a Republican vs. Democrat issue, with Republicans being solidly behind it, Democrats not, because they’re supported a lot by teachers’ unions and school districts and school board members and so forth.

Gardner: Right.

Williams: So that’s probably the biggest obstacle that I see right now, is an elevated effort by traditional public schools and traditional districts to really limit charter schools – new charter schools and present charter schools.

Gardner: Okay. That was definitely leading into my next question. So does that also affect schools that are currently in operation and open right now?

Williams: Yes, and the Florida legislature has worked very hard to walk right I call kind of a tightrope, but being in favor of strong accountability measures, but not wanting to kill the gnat with a sledgehammer type of attitude.

We have one of the statues in Florida … or the charter statute in Florida says when you get a second F, two Fs on a charter school, you have to close the charter school.

Gardner: Right.

Williams: We have a number of traditional schools in Florida who have received F, F, F, F, F, F. They may have a turnaround plan, but they just continue to operate. The legislature’s tried to kind of move that, kind of limit their choices in doing that, having certain turnaround plans, and one of those is opening up to a charter school.

We did that in Jefferson County. The State Board of Education saw just persistently failing schools there and finally toward the school board of Jefferson County … It’s like, “You have no choice. You have to turn this into a charter district. That’s the only thing we can approve.”

Since then, they’ve gone from an F to a C in their first year of operation, on less dollars than what the school district was operating on before.

Gardner: Right.

Williams: So we’ve seen where, with the right environment, that those kids are certainly capable of learning. Also, kids that were leaving Jefferson County, going to Leon County and other counties to get to better schools, where their parents were sending them, are now coming back to Jefferson. So they’re seeing their student populations increase. So we’ve proven that we can do that.

Gardner: True.

Williams: So the legislature’s worked very hard to make it as level a playing field as possible and then hold districts more accountable for those persistently low failing schools that they have.

Gardner: That’s excellent. All right. So, lastly, what do you see for the future of charter schools in Florida?

Williams: I see tremendous opportunity in terms of its growth, personally. The folks that I work with on a regular basis, the members of the legislature, and the Florida Department of Education …

We have a unique situation in Florida, where our former Speaker of the House, Richard Corcoran, who was a very, very, very big proponent of charter schools and, under his watch, passed some very significant legislation in regard to Schools of Hope, Hope Scholarships.

Gardner: Right.

Williams: Very, very, very pro-choice. After his Speaker term ended along with his legislative term, we got a new governor, Ron DeSantis, who then appointed him, essentially, as our new education commissioner.

So now we have, within the Department of Education, a very strong choice department, particularly for charter schools, and we’ve seen a lot go on recently that has certainly indicated that that’s the direction that the Department of Education’s going to go in.

The legislature continues to be very strong on choice and very strong on charter schools. We’ve strengthened the Schools of Hope legislation we passed two years ago. We’ve done some other changes to the statute that make it even more enhanced, better incentives for Schools of Hope.

We’re seeing the results of that right now. KIPP Schools is coming into Hillsborough County. They’re starting this year. IDEA schools are starting in Miami Bay. Those are already on the books. Now just had announced about in the last week or so that KIPP’s now going to open several in Duval County.

Gardner: Oh, wow.

Williams: I mean, so they’re seeing that opportunity there. So this is going to be a major influx of schools, from a world-renowned group like IDEA Schools.

Gardner: That’s good.

Williams: So I think you’re going to continue to see the legislature work both on fine-tuning the accountability measures – certainly holding those schools that are not doing as well as they should accountable, but recognizing those schools that are outperforming their traditional partners and recognizing them.

So I think the attitude and the environment is very strongly for charter schools.

Gardner: Excellent. All right. Thank you for your time.

Williams: You’re welcome.

The 2020 Election Charter School Divide: White Dems v. Minority Dems

Editor’s Note: This article discussing the political charter school divide, was originally published here on May 23rd by the Washington Free Beacon and was written by Charles Fain Lehman, a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon.

Across the U.S., the charter school debate rolls on. Democrats are often broadly painted as opponents to school choice. But the story is not nearly so simple. This article shows an evident divide between white democrats, who are more often against charter schools, and minority democrats, who are much more inclined to be in favor of charter schools and school choice.

Read the full article below to learn more about the racial disparity around the charter school divide.

White Dems Oppose Charter Schools; Minority Dems Support

New data shows likely fault line in 2020 primary

While Democrats are often thought of as opponents of school choice, new data show the story is not so simple: an examination of trends from 2016 through 2018 revealed that while white Democrats have grown staunchly opposed, their Black and Hispanic peers remain in favor of charter schools.

In an already hot 2020 campaign, charters have become targets for left-leaning candidates. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in a speech Saturday called for an end to federal funding of for-profit charter schools, and a prohibition on funding of new charter schools, including not-for-profits. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) sided with Sanders, calling for-profit charters in particular “a real problem right now.”

Sanders and Warren are, broadly speaking, in line with the majority view of their party. Education Next, a pro-reform journal, has polled Americans on their views on charter schools since 2013, providing detailed data on party breakdown since 2015. Their polls indicate that charters are consistently more popular with Republicans than with Democrats, and that the schools have slipped to being net unfavorable with the latter group in recent years.

However, this overall unpopularity hides a surprising trend within Democrats. Chalkbeat, an education news site, asked Education Next to provide it with racial decomposition of support for charters within Democrats. The results were startling.

Charter schools have enjoyed net support among Hispanic and Black Democrats for at least the past two years, the Education Next data indicate. But support has cratered among white Democrats. In fact, as of 2018, nearly twice as many (50 percent) of white Democrats opposed charters as supported them (27 percent).

The reason for the emergence of this racial disparity is unclear. Chalkbeat speculated that it may be because Black and Hispanic parents have more direct exposure to charter schools: The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools estimates that compared to regular public schools, public charters enroll more Black (27 percent versus 15 percent) and Hispanic (26 percent versus 22 percent) students.

It could also be because Black and Hispanic parents are more dissatisfied with their current school options. Chalkbeat pointed to a recent Pew poll finding that black voters tend to care about access to school diversity over local schooling, while white voters prefer the opposite, signaling that white respondents are happy with what they have while black respondents want better opportunities. (Hispanic and Asian parents were evenly divided.)

Regardless of the underlying cause, this divide over charter schools will likely prove important in Democratic politics in the near future. This is especially the case because, as recent research from the American Enterprise Institute shows, most figures in the “school reform” movement are Democrats. Notwithstanding broad Republican support for charters, conflict between major players in the school reform movement and their opponents is essentially an intra-party fight.

That fight will likely have consequences for the 2020 primary. Charter-opponent Sanders struggled to garner the support of black primary voters in 2016. His choice of “teachers unions over black voters,” as the Wall Street Journal framed it, may further cement his second-place status compared to front-runner Joe Biden (D., Del.), who has taken the lead among even younger black voters.

In fact, opposition to charters may have already cost Democrats not only votes, but at least one major election. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R.) narrow victory over Andrew Gillum (D.) in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial election was partially thanks to a surprisingly high number of votes from Black women: 18 percent gave him their support, double the backing Sen. Rick Scott (R.) received.

The reason for this, William Mattox of the Marshall Center for Educational Options argued in the Wall Street Journal, was DeSantis’s support for school choice.

“More than 100,000 low-income students in Florida participate in the Step Up For Students program, which grants tax-credit funded scholarships to attend private schools. Even more students are currently enrolled in the state’s 650 charter schools,” Mattox wrote. “Most Step Up students are minorities whose mothers are registered Democrats. Yet many of these ‘school-choice moms’ vote for gubernatorial candidates committed to protecting their ability to choose where their child goes to school.”

DeSantis has responded to this signal: earlier this month, he signed a new school voucher program for low-income Floridians into law.

Data, meanwhile, continue to support the efficacy of charter schools over traditional public education. A recent study of Boston’s expansion of its charter program found that previously successful charters were able to “scale up,” serving more kids without losing any of their benefits to SAT scores and college enrollment compared to non-charter schools.