Dive Brief:

• In Detroit and Flint, MI, 53% of students attend charter schools, and that number rises to 92% in New Orleans, with some 14 other districts nationwide enrolling at least 30% of their student population in charters, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ 2016 annual report.
• In 14 out of 16 districts where more than three in 10 students attend charters and 2014-15 performance data was available, charter school students made up a disproportionate share of students scoring proficient on standardized tests, including 70% of students labeled proficient in Camden, NJ, where only 31% of students attend charters.
• Los Angeles has the highest number of students enrolled in charter schools, with more than 156,000, and the nearly 100,000 charter school students in New York City reflect nearly double the enrollment from five years ago.

Dive Insight:

In the debate over the impact of charter schools, it is important to look at numbers like student performance. It is not universally true that charter school students have better academic performance than their traditional neighborhood school peers. But where that is true, those who oppose charter schools on principle must recognize the value in that.

As charter school enrollment continues to grow, however, it is important to ask whether a critical mass of charter schools in a single district ends up having a negative impact on students because of cannibalization of a single system. Charter caps are in place in some cities to protect against that phenomenon. Those who support all charter schools on principle must recognize the consequences on this side, even if the students in charters end up being served well.