Kevin Mahnken
74 Million

New research on Chicago’s public high schools shows that charter school students not only score higher on standardized tests than their counterparts in traditional district schools, but also do markedly better on a range of post-secondary results like college enrollment and persistence.

Even while providing new evidence of Chicago charters’ superior performance on many measures of school quality, however, the data also bring happy tidings for the city’s public schools as a whole: The gap between school sectors in indicators like school environment and teacher collaboration is closing, due mostly to recent improvement from district schools.