INDIANAPOLIS – More Hoosier parents are opting to send their kids to charter schools, and new research insists that moving away from traditional public schools increases students’ likelihood to achieve academically and after graduation.
A study released last week from the University of Arkansas dives into the “cost-effectiveness and return on investment” of charter school attendance in Indianapolis and eight other U.S. communities.
Researchers said their findings show that charter schools yield more learning and more predicted lifetime earnings per education dollar spent. They emphasize, too, that charter schools tend to serve a higher percentage of students in poverty than traditional public schools.
Across the nine areas studied, the latest research found that charter schools, on average, produce higher student achievement gains per $1,000 funded than traditional schools.
The study comes on the heels of two other reports from Indiana University; one confirming that Hoosier students are increasingly leaving their traditional public schools for other options, and another which shows that nearly half of all students who left public school corporations in Fall 2022 transferred to a different public school option, like a charter school.
Indiana lawmakers gave charter schools major funding boosts in the new state budget after advocates ramped up lobbying efforts in the 2023 legislative session to extend more benefits to the traditional public counterparts.
However, charter school critics have long argued that such schools are not obligated to serve every student in a given community — unlike those in traditional public school districts. That’s because capacity limits student enrollment.
The public charters also have private boards and are therefore not accountable to voters, opponents say.
“School choice” supporters, however, maintain that parents deserve the right to more flexibility and customization in their children’s education. Doing so requires increased access to private schools, but also public charters.
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