Test Scores Don’t Lie: Charter Schools Are Transformative Our black and Hispanic students in Central Harlem outperform the city’s white pupils by double digits.By Eva Moskowitz

Posted By on August 24th, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/test-scores-dont-lie-charter-schools-are-transformative-1503528384

 I grew up in Harlem in the 1960s and early ’70s. My brother and I attended a failing school where we were the only white students. My parents, both professors, supplemented our education at home, but we understood that our classmates were wholly dependent on the inadequate education the school offered. Even at that young age I perceived this as a terrible injustice.

Thirty years later, when I was again living in Harlem and ready to send my own son to school, those same schools were still abysmally low-performing. In 2006, when I opened my first charter school in Harlem, the district schools were still failing.

Today, there is a different story to tell about Harlem, and it is thanks to a school-choice movement that has given rise to dozens of high-performing charter schools. Today, almost half of the students in Central Harlem attend a charter school; in East Harlem, a quarter do.

The results of the 2017 New York state tests were released Tuesday, and my staff has been busy crunching the numbers. They demonstrate how transformative this development has been for Harlem residents. In Central Harlem, for example, the number of students meeting rigorous, Common Core math standards has more than doubled since 2013—from 1,690 to 3,703. Students attending charter schools account for 96% of that growth. Results for English language arts are similarly inspiring.

The highest performing charter schools, like Success Academy, have actually reversed the achievement gap. Black and Hispanic students from Central Harlem’s seven Success Academy schools outperform white students across the city by 33 points in math and 21 points in reading; low-income students outperform the city’s affluent students by 38 and 24 points in math and reading respectively.

Recently, the NAACP called for a moratorium on charter schools, claiming they created a system that was “separate and unequal.” Lily Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, made a similar argument at a summer gathering of her members. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten went so far as to say school-choice and charters were the “polite cousins” to Jim Crow segregation.

Given the incredible academic progress evident among Harlem’s charter-school students—and among low-income children of color attending charter schools across the country—these accusations are breathtakingly cynical, designed to protect a union-dominated system that has failed urban communities for decades.

To justify their arguments, Ms. Weingarten and others propagate the myth that charter-school successes have come at the expense of traditional district schools. But this claim has been disproved again and again. In New York City, for example, a comprehensive study found improved academic performance, safety, and student engagement at district schools with charter schools, particularly high-performing ones, located nearby or in the same building. CONTINUE AT SITE

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