Meanwhile, Hawaii appeared at the bottom, with students there learning the equivalent of a year-and-a-half less than the typical charter school student.

The study, by Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel of Harvard University and published Tuesday in , finds that students in Alaska turned in the strongest academic performance as judged by National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

Students in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and New Jersey followed closely behind, the researchers found, while charter school students in Hawaii, Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon and Pennsylvania performed the worst.

Peterson said using NAEP data for the analysis offered researchers an opportunity for a fresh, unvarnished look at charter school performance, one not often seen via state achievement tests, which for years have been criticized for manipulating proficiency levels. 

NAEP, he said, is “a low-stakes test” that’s not tied to teacher pay or school rankings. And the data is “very clean because exactly the same test is being administered to every single student. So we are comparing student performances on the same tests and no other.”

The disadvantage is that the results are much more constrained than typical state tests, offering scores in just fourth and eighth grades. That makes it impossible to analyze high school performance, a key concern. But Peterson noted that most charter schools are elementary or middle schools, so the data actually capture a more accurate picture of how the sector performs.

One thing the NAEP data revealed: a serious achievement gap among charter school students in several states.

In D.C. and five states — Missouri, Wisconsin, Delaware, Michigan and Maryland — the  gap between Black and white charter school students was roughly the equivalent of  three-and-one-half years of learning.

They found the largest score differences between white and Hispanic students in D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho and Massachusetts. 

In a statement, the said the new data are “sobering in many respects,” showing that charter schools in many places have “room to grow.” But it said the data show “many bright spots in the charter sector, and we are especially proud of the exceptional work being done in states like Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York and Oklahoma to produce positive outcomes on NAEP.” 

Peterson said he was most surprised by Alaska’s performance, but soon realized he shouldn’t be: It’s got a highly educated population and an unusual education culture. Because it’s so remote and sparsely populated, he said, correspondence schools have had a presence there since the 1930s. “And not just a few, a lot of them,” he said. “So the idea of having alternatives to the neighborhood school is very much part of their history.”

He also theorized that Alaska’s charters may have the resources to staff and equip new schools more easily than elsewhere.

As for Hawaii, he noted that half of its charter schools are explicitly serving the indigenous Hawaiian population — and half of those are teaching not in English, but in Hawaiian, as their purpose is to preserve that disappearing language.

States’ rankings based on charter students’ NAEP scores, the researchers said, were “only weakly correlated” with state rankings based on NAEP data for all public school students. And they found no significant difference in performance among states with different per-pupil charter funding levels or percentages of students enrolled in charter schools.

And though the study looked at charter schools nationally, the analysis isn’t all-encompassing. 

Peterson and Shakeel looked at 145,730 NAEP results for fourth- and eighth-graders in 35 states and D.C. from 2009 to 2019, but excluded 10 states without enough data: Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Washington, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

In five other states — Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont — there were no charter schools during the time period studied.

Management, authorizers matter

The researchers also found that the type of charter school matters, as does the governmental body authorizing it.

Students in schools managed by a nonprofit network scored better on NAEP tests, while those at freestanding independent charters and for-profit charter schools did more poorly.

Though just 20% of charters are in networks, said Harvard’s Peterson, “It’s clear that if you have a network, you have more opportunities for promotion within the organization. So you can keep people for a longer period of time. You’ve got more management roles that people can grow into.”

Charter schools in networks can also share practices and standardize back office functions. “A lot of the problems that the little mom-and-pop school faces when it’s starting up, it’s got to sort of invent the whole wheel all over again.”

Who authorizes the school also matters: Students whose charter schools are authorized by a state education agency fared better than those whose schools were authorized by a school district, mayor’s office or a university. Peterson said that shouldn’t come as a surprise either, since a state department of education’s job is to supervise schools’ performance. “They have been doing this for 100 years. So if they’re now given a task to also do this for charter schools, they have the institutional capacity to do it. If you ask a university to do it, the university has never done this before. So they’re probably not going to be likely to have the equipment to do a great job of it.”

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, which supports the U.S.’s largest public charter school network, said the new findings “confirm our experience, which is that public charter schools perform better when they are part of a larger network.”

The new analysis differs from the recent Stanford University , which compared charter school performance to that of students in nearby district schools. In its statement, the alliance said the CREDO study affirms that students who attend charter schools “generally have better academic outcomes when compared to their peers at nearby district schools. And we maintain our commitment to serving all students well, especially those who have been chronically underserved.”

Foremost among them: expanding career and technical education.

Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the conservative , scoured the websites of all 72 major-party candidates in 2022’s gubernatorial races. In all, he found 27 education issues supported by at least one candidate.

The data suggest clear partisan divides: Among Democrats, the top two issues mentioned were increasing K-12 funding and expanding Pre-K. Among Republicans, it was school choice and curricular reform.

But one issue rounded out the top three among both Democrats and Republicans: CTE. Along with greater funding, it was mentioned more frequently than any other topic. In all, 30 candidates, or 42%, featured it on their websites.

Higher funding held a distant fourth place for Republicans, far below CTE. An equal percentage of GOP candidates — 22% — expressed support for charter schools and better reading instruction.

Smarick, a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents who has also served as chair of the state’s Higher Education Commission and president of its State Board of Education, said he wasn’t surprised to find CTE hold such a prominent place.

“So many people have pushed for so long for a ‘college for all’ mentality, which was good and important, that now a lot of elected officials are saying we also have to do something on certificates and certifications and apprenticeships” and other career-driven outcomes.

He also noted that many college-going students don’t end up with a four-year degree. “So state legislators and governors have to think in terms of ‘How do we serve all of these adults?’”

The findings resonate with those of a survey released earlier this month that found Americans now want K-12 education to focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is already signaling that CTE is a priority: Last week he previewed the administration’s “Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success” initiative, which seeks to overhaul secondary education with an eye toward granting students the skills and credentials necessary to enter college or the workforce after 12th grade. 

Designed in concert with First Lady Jill Biden as well as the secretaries of commerce and labor, it urges colleges to offer dual-enrollment coursework to high school juniors.

The National Student Clearinghouse has estimated that the number of students with “some college, no credential” in 2020 grew to , roughly the .

It may be a surprise, then, that while 28% of Democratic candidates in Smarick’s analysis mentioned expanding community college, not a single Republican did.

Big differences between incumbents, challengers

Smarick also broke out mentions between incumbents and challengers, finding that non-incumbent Democrats discussed several issues that no incumbent did: One in four articulated what he called an “anti-school choice position,” and more than one in five argued for less school testing. 

He theorized that perhaps these challengers “believed taking these positions would help them win primaries and garner support of teachers’ unions.”

Likewise, 38% of Republican non-incumbents expressed support for charter schools, while not a single Republican incumbent did. Non-incumbents were about twice as likely as incumbents to say they supported school choice more generally (81% to 40%). Smarick suggested that this is because these non-incumbents, like their Democratic counterparts, were also focused on winning primaries and earning the support of base voters who support more ideological causes.

Incumbents, he said, zeroed in on more practical day-to-day issues like early childhood and funding and, in red states, expanding the number of choices available to families. “It just seems like once you’ve been in office for a while, a lot of these incumbents realize that lots of families like their traditional public schools and they want to make sure that they’re well-funded.”

That may especially be true of schools in the “COVID era,” he said, which need extra funding so students can recover academically. 

More broadly, Smarick said, public opinion polls consistently show that the public “likes the idea of well-funded schools. So it’s not really a surprise that incumbents, including Republicans, put that on their list of things that they want to make sure they accomplish.”

Harvard University education scholar Martin West, a co-author of the annual public opinion survey on school issues, said the differences between incumbents and non-incumbents are “fascinating” and suggest that “the experience of running a state school system, or perhaps the responsibility of having run one, has a moderating effect on candidates’ views.”

He also noted that the striking differences in positions taken by Democrat and Republican candidates are consistent with the most recent EdNext findings showing greater partisan polarization overall.

Blue state, red state, swing state divides

When it came to the states candidates were vying to lead, Democratic nominees didn’t offer many surprises: Those in blue states supported traditional “higher-dollar” initiatives such as expanding pre-K and community college, and raising K-12 funding levels and teacher pay. And while blue-state Democrats talked about investments in community college and university systems, swing-state Democrats were much more likely to discuss CTE.

As for Republicans, red-state GOP candidates were actually less likely to advocate for more red-meat Republican positions such as a parents’ bill of rights or measures to block so-called critical race theory in the classroom. Just one in five GOP nominees in red states advocated for these policies, fewer than in blue or swing states.

Perhaps most striking: In blue states, more than half of GOP nominees took a pro-charter position, but in red states, not a single GOP nominee did. They were also four times more likely to advocate for more K-12 funding than their blue-state GOP counterparts.

Smarick said that perhaps red-state GOP nominees saw less of a need than their blue-state counterparts to fret about instructional crises in schools — or that perhaps their states’ public schools perform well enough to lessen the need to advocate for school-choice and charter reforms.

But it may also suggest a kind of “remarkable” generational change around charter schools, he said.

“If we go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, lots of Republican candidates were more willing to talk about charter schools than school choice,” Smarick said. “Now it seems to have flipped.”

And since many of those pro-school-choice Republicans won their races, he said, “in red states, we’re going to see the tax credits, more ESA [Education Savings Account] stuff. And this is different than it was, certainly, a generation ago.”

Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Republicans in Smarick’s analysis talked about supporting school choice, while just one Democrat, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, mentioned it.

When it came to how these issues played out, Smarick found a few surprises: Increasing K-12 funding was a “top-five” issue among winners in blue, swing, and red states.

Matt Hogan, a partner at the Democratic polling firm , said he wasn’t surprised. He said Impact’s polling has consistently shown that increasing K-12 funding “is very popular and its continued popularity is consistent with voters’ desire a focus on bread-and-butter issues when it comes to education, rather than engaging in culture war fights.” 

For Democrats, Harvard’s West noted, the push for more K-12 funding was paired with expanding Pre-K and community college, two investments “with which K-12 funding will have to compete.” That may help to explain why states that switch from Republican to Democratic control have traditionally on K-12 schools, he said.

In the end, what might be most significant in Smarick’s findings is what’s not mentioned: teacher shortages. They got “minimal attention” from candidates, with just three of 72 even mentioning the issue.

“I kept looking through these websites, expecting half or three-quarters of candidates to talk about it, and they just didn’t,” Smarick said.

Though the issue was , “It was the dog that didn’t bark” on candidates’ websites. “Which makes you think maybe we ought to take a look at what’s happening in states as opposed to just following national narratives about education policy.”

The results of the benchmark federal exam, referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed startling declines in student performance, including the first-ever drop in long-term math scores. Nine-year-olds, who have made steady progress since the test was first administered in the early 1970s, saw roughly twenty years of measured growth evaporate between 2020 and 2022. 

Using the results of state standardized tests, as well as private assessments like the MAP or iReady exams, a growing cadre of academics have offered evidence of K-12 learning deficits produced COVID’s disruption to school operations — including signs that Democratic-leaning states and districts, which were more likely to close schools longer, saw less instruction and steeper hits to achievement. But NAEP provides the first nationally representative data confirming those suspicions and charting the diverging effects on distinct student groups.

While average math and English scores fell for virtually all students, historically disadvantaged children — among them African Americans, Hispanics, the poor, and academically struggling students — generally saw larger drops, widening the gaps with their higher-scoring peers. 

Martin West is the academic dean and Henry Less Shattuck professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent, nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP, he also has a unique perspective on the test and the data it generates.

In an email exchange Thursday with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, West spoke about the results, the possibility of growing educational inequity as a result of the pandemic, and public perception of schools in its wake. Asked whether the steep drop in performance could be remedied with time and more resources, his answer was stark.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know, as we’ve never seen a decline of this size and scope before,” West said.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: The public reaction to these results has been huge — almost surprisingly so, given that prior studies have indicated significant learning deficits resulting from the pandemic. Do you think NAEP’s role as the authoritative national exam just makes these trends un-ignorable?

Martin West: It has certainly been gratifying, as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, to see the strong reaction to the results. And I do think that reaction speaks to NAEP’s reputation as the authoritative source for tracking the achievement of American students over time. The NAEP Long-Term Trend, in particular, has remained essentially unchanged for more than fifty years. NAEP assessments are also the only tests that are routinely administered to samples that are truly representative of the nation as a whole. I think the latter factor in particular helps explain why NAEP results garner so much national media coverage. Reports based on state tests are inherently local stories. Reports based on interim assessment data leave room for doubts about whether they are truly representative. NAEP releases are national stories.

Do you think the steady trickle of bad news, whether from NAEP or other tests, is related to the diminished perceptions of public schools found in the EdNext poll, among others?

I think it is impossible to separate the role bad news about test scores has played in shaping public perceptions from the role played by factors like prolonged school closures that caused test scores to decline in the first place. So the bad news is definitely related to the diminished perceptions of school quality, but I don’t think we can say for sure that it has an independent effect.

It sounds pretty bad for students to be scoring at levels that were last seen 20 or more years ago. But what should we expect in terms of bounce-back achievement now that schools are essentially all offering in-person learning? In other words, while this is a very sharp one-time decline, is it likely to reset the learning trajectory for millions of kids permanently?

The honest answer is that we don’t know, as we’ve never seen a decline of this size and scope before. Recent reports based on interim assessments suggest that, as students resumed in-person instruction, they have generally demonstrated rates of achievement growth that were typical before the pandemic. That is encouraging as far as it goes, but it would not be enough to help the students whose educations have been disrupted return to where they would have been absent the pandemic.

This is one reason why I think it is critical to be clear about what we mean by recovery. Over the next decade, as students whose learning was not disrupted by the pandemic begin to move through the K-12 system, I’d expect NAEP results to revert back to pre-pandemic levels. We might then be tempted to say that the system as a whole has bounced back. But there are roughly 50 million students whose educations were disrupted — including two of my sons — and I would not want us to declare success unless we’ve also helped the specific students who were impacted make up lost ground. We have an obligation to help them experience accelerated rather than typical growth going forward.

On the other hand, these large scoring drops are presumably also interacting with the long-term stagnation or declines that we saw in last year’s release of long-term trends data from before the pandemic. If the pre-COVID situation was essentially one of weak growth, is it fair to say that the mere return to in-person learning won’t be enough to get students back on track?

That’s exactly right. From 2009 to 2019, we’ve seen the unfortunate combination of stagnant average scores and growing inequality between higher- and lower-achieving students. Today’s release confirmed that those lower-achieving students were also hardest hit by the pandemic. A return to business as usual would therefore only reinforce the pandemic’s unequal effects rather than offset them.

My impression is that the Long-Term Trend results since the early ’70s have essentially shown slowly shrinking performance gaps between students in different subgroups. But yesterday’s release indicated that the math disparity between white and African American students is now growing, and I believe Hispanic and students in the National School Lunch Program (a common metric of poverty) also experienced larger declines in math than white and non-NSLP students, respectively. How concerned should we be that COVID has not only led to general learning loss, but also hindered the progress of historically disadvantaged subgroups?

One legitimate (if clearly partial) success story of American education that is well documented by the Long-Term Trend NAEP is the gradual narrowing of achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. It is therefore jarring to see the math gap between Black and white students increase sharply in this year’s data. The other differences you note across groups were not large enough to be statistically significant, but they do point in the same direction of greater inequality. This is not necessarily surprising given what we know about the pandemic’s impact on historically disadvantaged subgroups generally, but it is certainly concerning.

Were you as surprised as I was by the reading scores, which didn’t show widening racial gaps between white, Hispanic, and African American students? Given what existing studies have shown about literacy setbacks during the pandemic, I was expecting a different result. It also seemed noteworthy that schools in cities, which obviously enroll disproportionate percentages of non-white students, didn’t see lower reading scores for nine-year-olds. How much faith should we put in these figures?

I agree that this pattern in reading is a bit unexpected, all things considered, but I find it hard to be too encouraged by results showing an equally large decline across these three racial groups. I’ll also be curious to see if this pattern is confirmed on the “main NAEP” results set for release this October. The lack of a decline for city schools is also a puzzle. Here, though, it is important to keep in mind that the NCES [National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP test] definition of “city” schools is not limited to large urban districts. 

For example, my own local district in Newton, Massachusetts, is classified as a “city” district despite the fact that most Boston-area residents would think of it as a suburb. The results for the 26 school districts that participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment and will be included in the main NAEP release will provide a clearer picture of what’s happened in the nation’s big-city schools.