Chicago's Charter High Schools

This study-the Consortium's first in-depth look at charter high schools-examines four key dimensions of charter high schools in Chicago Public Schools (CPS): school organization and policies; incoming skills and characteristics of charter high school enrollees; school transfers; and student performance. It expands the existing research base on charter schools in important ways by moving beyond test scores to look at a range of outcomes, and by examining variation among charter high schools. This study finds differences between charter and non-charter high schools in CPS in terms of students' incoming characteristics, performance in high school, and performance on post-secondary outcomes. It also finds variation on outcomes across charter schools. The study finds charter high schools in Chicago enroll students with higher eighth-grade attendance but similar or lower eighth-grade test scores than non-charter high schools. Once enrolled, students in charter high schools reported more challenging instruction, had higher attendance, and had higher test scores, on average, compared to students in non-charter high schools with similar attendance and test scores in the middle grades. Rates of four-year college enrollment and enrollment in more selective colleges were higher, on average, for students at charter schools than similar students at non-charter high schools. Using the five essentials framework to measure school climate, the study finds, on average, CPS charter high schools looked similar to non-charter, non-selective schools on some dimensions of organizational capacity, such as leadership, but looked quite different on other dimensions, such as preparation for post-secondary. At the same time, the study finds charter high school students were more likely to transfer schools between 9-12th grade than similar students in non-charter high schools. By the beginning of the fourth year of high school, 24.2 percent of students who began high school in a charter school transferred to another school in the district, compared to 17.2 percent of non-charter students. The majority of students who transferred by the beginning of their second year in high school transferred to a CPS non-charter high school. Transfer rates were highest in low-performing or recently-opened charter high schools. The study did not look at the reasons students transferred. Notably, the study also finds substantial variation across charter schools on test scores, college enrollment, and college selectivity. After controlling for differences in students' incoming skills, experience, and background characteristics, there was far more variation among charter schools on these outcomes, than among non-charter schools.
About the Author: JULIA GWYNNE is a Managing Director and Senior Research Scientist at UChicago Consortium. Her current work focuses on early warning indicators of high school and college readiness and the use of indicators with groups such as English Language Learners and students with disabilities. PAUL T. MOORE was a Research Analyst at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research at the time this research was conducted. He has substantial experience evaluating the impacts of education policies and is an expert in causal inference with quasi-experimental designs. His research interests include urban school reform, school choice policies and practices, and quasi-experimental design methodologies. Moore has studied historical trends in student performance and school quality in Chicago, has identified indicators of student performance in middle school that best predict success in high school and in college, and has examined the impacts of elementary school closures in Chicago, the impacts of attending a higher-performing high school, and the impacts of attending a charter high school in Chicago. He has co-authored a number of journal articles and reports, and his work is frequently covered in local and national media. The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) builds the capacity for school reform by conducting research that identifies what matters for student success and school improvement. Created in 1990, UChicago Consortium conducts research of high technical quality that can inform and assess policy and practice in the Chicago Public Schools. UChicago Consortium studies also have informed broader national movements in public education. UChicago Consortium encourages the use of research in policy action and improvement of practice but does not argue for particular policies or programs. Rather, UChicago Consortium helps to build capacity for school reform by identifying what matters for student success and school improvement, creating critical indicators to chart progress, and conducting theory-driven evaluation to identify how programs and policies are working.