By Eric Berschback
Recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that Arizona’s public charter school students have posted greater scale score gains than any individual state, from 2009 to 2017. The data show that when measured as their own “state”, Arizona charter students outpaced the gains realized by their state level peers in all four major tested subjects: fourth grade reading and math, as well as eighth grade reading and math.
Charter students in Arizona achieved these increases in NAEP scale scores even while the nation as a whole experienced little or no growth over that same 2009 to 2017 time period. While the country saw modest gains of 1 scale score point and 3 scale score points in fourth and eighth grade reading, respectively, there was no change to overall scale scores in either grade for mathematics from 2009 to 2017.
The change of 20 and 30 scale score points, respectively, by Arizona charter eighth graders is especially laudable, as no state even came close to posting similar gains during that same timeframe. In fact, the largest positive change for a state in any tested subject area and grade level was a +10 change in scale score by California in eighth grade reading. The gains of +20 and +30 stood out on their own in this particular analysis.
Of course, Arizona’s population of public charter school students is much smaller than the entire public school enrollment of a large state like California. However, in the 2015-16 school year, the most recent year of state-by-state enrollment data, Arizona’s charter student enrollment ranked comparable to some of the smaller states in the nation.
As a sector, charter schools are regularly scrutinized for their performance and academic achievements; this is certainly the case in Arizona. These data demonstrate the positive impact that public charter schools have on their students’ academic achievement and growth over the past several years. This type of analysis of NAEP scores is only possible because of Arizona’s large population of charter schools and students, which is on par with several states. The results are clear: Arizona charter school’s students significantly improved their NAEP scores in 2017—placing them first in the country for improvement!
Methodology
Data were downloaded from NCES data tool following the 2017 NAEP results release.
Scale scores downloaded from NCES contain several decimal digits, which were used for ranking purposes and calculation purposes, but all scores and changes in score shown here are rounded. Table 1 shows changes in scale score in fourth grade math and eighth grade reading that are seemingly incorrect, but they are the result of rounding.
NCES includes Washington D.C., as well as the Department of Defense as “Jurisdictions” that are listed along with the 50 states, but each were excluded from our analysis, which was intended to compare Arizona’s charter school students to other states.
