By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

PALO ALTO, Cal. – In a year’s time, students in Michigan’s 250 charter schools received roughly two more months of learning on average than students who attended their assigned public school, according to a five-year study released this week by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.

“We’re looking at students who look identical to each other and have the exact same starting score and we’re saying the charter students came out a little bit ahead in terms of learning for that school year, every year,” Devora Davis, researcher for the study, told Michigan Radio.

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The Stanford study backs up the notion that charter schools, and other school choice options, help students who need help the most. The results suggest charters could play a key role in closing the infamous achievement gap between white and black students and wealthy and poor students.

“Charter schools are certainly having a very positive impact where they are needed the most, where the options for parents are limited, they’ve provided an important solution,” Dan Quisenberry, president of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, told the radio station.

The study puts the state’s teachers unions in a peculiar situation. They have long argued that charter schools and other school choice options are no better than government schools.

But even the state’s largest teachers union now seems ready to begrudgingly acknowledge that charter schools are better at educating students than traditional public schools.

Doug Pratt, a spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, was left scratching his head.

“Now somebody’s gotta ask and answer the question as to ‘why?’ so that we can take the things that they’re learning and apply it to everybody else,” he told Michigan Radio.

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Pratt suggested some plausible but unlikely excuses: there are fewer special education students in charters, and students in charters have more engaged parents.

The real reason is that most charter schools do not have union teaching staffs, so they don’t have to deal with all the contractual nonsense that hold traditional schools back.

Traditional schools pay through the nose for union labor, and are hamstrung by union rules that dictate the length of the school day and year, personnel assignments, class sizes, and virtually every other aspect of school operations.

Charter school administrators have more freedom to run their schools the way they see fit, with student academics as the primary focus.

That makes a huge difference when it comes to achievement, as the Stanford study demonstrates.