While coverage of the latest national test data has focused on the astonishingly low performance of high school seniors (myself included), declines were not experienced in every school setting.
Twelfth-grade performance on the 2024 reading and math National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests declined among students at traditional public schools, but charter school students avoided the drop. This held true among high-performing students and their lower-performing peers.
For example, on the 12th-grade reading NAEP, the average score among traditional high school seniors dropped three points from 2019, when the test was last administered. Among high-performing students (those in the 75th percentile) and lower-performing students (those in the 25th percentile), their scores each also dropped three points from what they were in 2019. On the math assessment, the average score declined four points, and high-performing students’ scores also declined four points. Lower-performing students’ scores dropped five points. NAEP categorized the declines for all three student groups as significant score differences from the 2019 results.
Charter school seniors, on the other hand, did not experience these same declines, with average scores and scores among high-performing and lower-performing students holding steady in both reading and math compared to 2019.
National Assessment of Educational Progress: Grade 12 Reading, 2024
National Assessment of Educational Progress: Grade 12 Math, 2024
Even with their declines, though, traditional public school seniors outperformed charter school seniors in both subjects. But there is a troubling pattern in the long-term trends of traditional public school scores — average scores and scores among their lower-performing students have consistently declined in reading since 2013. In math, scores among lower-performing students have been dropping since 2013, and average scores have been dropping since 2015. The trends are just the opposite among their charter school peers. Average scores and scores among lower-performing students have been on the rise since at least 2015, with this latest round from 2024 holding steady.
In Minnesota, charter schools have come under intense criticism by certain outfits over the last year, and as my colleague Josiah Padley documents here, the state legislature has also had the school model in its crosshairs.
Like any learning environment, Minnesota has its share of underperforming charter schools. (More can be said about the role of authorizer accountability.) And — unlike traditional public schools that fall short of expectations — those schools are getting shut down. But the top-ranked public schools in the state also always include a number of charter schools. There are reasons why 68,000 students and their parents are choosing charter schools in Minnesota and why hundreds of others are on waiting lists to get in.
Nationwide, charter schools are a small part of the education sector (educating around 8 percent of K-12 students), but are a popular and growing option. As policymakers and thought leaders pursue education reform to try and address the grave implications of these test results, they would do well to analyze what general factors could be contributing to the growth high school seniors at charter schools have experienced over the years that is perhaps missing from their traditional public school peers’ educational journey.