As Washington Policy Center prepares to hear from U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the nation’s leading champion of allowing parents choice in education, a new report shows how well public charter students perform on state tests. The Washington State Charter School Association recently released results of last spring’s state tests in reading and math. These results show Washington’s charter schools are delivering on their promise to help students catch up in school.  

Here are the numbers. The findings show that on average charter schools are more effective at teaching math and English to low-income students than traditional public schools.

This is good news for charter school families.

These results are especially good given the many, many political attacks made on these new schools. Charter schools opened in Washington state in August 2015, and within weeks, a lawsuit filed by the WEA teacher union sought to cut off their funding. In 2016 the legislature, passed a bi-partisan bill to protect the state and federal funding of charter schools. Still, charters are denied the same local levy and capital funding that traditional schools receive.

Many charter school students arrive at their new schools one or more years behind in reading and math. In one shocking example, 29 percent of incoming sixth-graders at Green Dot Destiny Middle Charter School in Tacoma had not acquired the basic phonics and reading skills they should have learned in kindergarten and first grade. This charter school must first teach these students how to read, before its teachers can even start teaching the 6^th-grade curriculum.  

It is no mystery why incoming charter school students cannot read. In 2017, the State Board of Education’s School Achievement Index identifies 365 failing public schools, where up to 50 percent of students drop out.  School officials routinely assign students to these schools, and have located most of these failing schools in urban communities.

Despite these challenges, Washington’s public charter schools are helping students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to learn. At one charter school, Spokane International School, 85 percent and 71 percent of low-income 7^th grade students passed the state test in English and math, respectively. These numbers exceed the state average for all students, which means that Spokane International has eliminated the academic achievement gap.

Clearly, parents are telling each other about charter schools. These popular choice schools have doubled their enrollment since last year, now at 2,400 students. Two new charter schools opened in Seattle this fall. Demand is so strong that most charter schools are oversubscribed and must conduct lotteries to decide which children can attend. 

The powerful WEA teachers union is continuing its selfish and mean-spirited attacks on charter school families, but even this powerful union is no match for caring parents determined to give their children a better chance in life.