A strong case for more charter schools

THE SINGLE most regrettable policy decison Governor Deval Patrick has made is to let the state's charter school movement languish - and now a compelling new study of Boston schools illustrates why.

Compared with students in traditional schools, charter school students are doing significantly better in math and English, according to the analysis by researchers from Harvard and MIT.

In some grades, the results of the study - which compares pupils who won a charter school spot in the student-selection lotteries used by oversubscribed charters with those who lost out - are dramatic.

The magnitude of improvement jumps out when students who got a lottery slot for the sixth grade are compared with those who did not. Both groups began at the same performance point, slightly above the Boston public school average.

"By eighth grade, though, the lottery winners on average were scoring very close to the Brookline public school average performance in math," says study leader Thomas Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "But the lottery losers, who mostly went back to the traditional public schools in Boston, were still only slightly above the Boston public school average."

The charter results weren't as pronounced at all grade levels, but they were consistently strong.

The research team also compared students in the traditional public schools with those of similar backgrounds who went to charters, an observational method that showed significant gains as well.

"[W]e generally find large positive effects for Charter Schools, at both the middle school and high school levels," the authors write.

But the lottery study is particularly powerful because that kind of evaluation controls for background variables. Results from such a comparison, for example, debunk the notion that the real reason charter students do better is that they have motivated parents who care more about their education.

The findings for pilot schools were more ambiguous. There were some positive effects in the elementary grades, but the observational study found underperformance at the middle school level. The observational results were stronger for pilot high schools, but the lottery study showed no difference.

Now, if data mattered more than dogma in education policy, this research, which was front-page news yesterday, would be a debate changer. Certainly the study drew a veritable who's who in Massachusetts education to the Boston Foundation for its formal release yesterday.

Commenting afterward, Mitchell Chester, the state's education commissioner, and Carol Johnson, superintendent of the Boston Public Schools, both talked of learning from charter schools, but skirted the real issue the report should raise: the need to lift the charter school cap, which at least one community has exceeded and a number of others are close to.

Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, which funded the research, was more direct. "There is no justification for keeping a charter cap in place that is denying urban, mostly black and brown children the opportunity for a demonstrably better result," Grogan said.

Added Tom Birmingham, co-author of the state's landmark education reform law: "If it's a good idea, why not replicate it as often as we can?"

So let's review the situation. The nation has a Democratic president-elect who is a strong supporter of charter schools and a federal secretary of education-designate who, as CEO of the Chicago school system, embraced charters wholeheartedly.

Here, however, we have a Democratic governor who has essentially put peace with the teachers unions over the proven potential of charters. Boston, meanwhile, has an incrementalist mayor who has long opposed charters. This new study shows the real costs to students of those counterproductive stands.

Patrick's reluctance to support more charters could hurt the state in other ways as well. Obama has proposed doubling, to $400 million, the annual federal funding for charter schools. If this state isn't creating more charters or expanding existing ones, it may risk leaving significant federal dollars on the table.

This is a leadership moment. It's time for the governor and the mayor to get on the students' side.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com.