Are Charter School Students Harder to Educate

One point of debate in the recent controversy in the media and among policy analysts over the academic achievement of charter school students is whether the charter students are in some way harder to educate than their counterparts enrolled in traditional public schools. In this paper we examine this question using data from the 2002-3 school year in Washington, D.C. We begin by examining a simple binomial model of the proportion of students in key demographic and programmatic categories linked to educability. We then turn to the estimation of a more theoretically appropriate mixture model that assumes two latent categories of charter schools. We conclude with an analysis that moves beyond simple demographic/programmatic factors to consider measures of educability using individual-level survey data from charter and traditional public school students. Overall, we find little evidence of differences in the educability of students in the two sectors.