Does Charter School Competition Raise Student Achievement in Traditional Public Schools?

School choice proponents argue that market competition to attract students to charter schools and other school choice options will improve the overall quality of public education by forcing traditional public schools to improve or lose students and their funding.  School choice opponents argue that choice mechanisms, such as charter schools, will reduce the overall quality of public education by drawing on the financial resources and attracting the most motivated students.

Claims are claims, but rigorous empirical literature on this topic is sparse, and the evidence regarding the effect of charter schools on traditional public schools is mixed.  A large part of the reason for this is that it is difficult to accurately measure charter school competition.  Two new papers take on this methodological challenge in different ways and within different states, but both arrive at the same conclusion: increased charter school competition is associated with declines in student achievement in traditional public schools.

Yongmei Ni examined the short-, medium- and long-term effects of charter school competition on Michigan's traditional public schools during an eleven year period.  The author found that not only was charter school competition associated with declines in traditional public school student achievement, but that the magnitude of this negative effect increased with the length of time that a school was exposed to charter competition.  These results are statistically significant and robust to a number of econometric tests.

Matthew Carr and Gary Ritter investigated the effect of charter school competition over a four year period on Ohio's traditional public schools using three different methods. Regardless of how competition was measured, the authors found a small but statistically significant negative effect of charter school competition on traditional public school achievement.  The negative effects found in both of these studies suggest that Ohio's and Michigan's charter schools have not improved the productive efficiency of traditional public schools as school choice proponents had anticipated.

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