Charter schools are public schools that operate with greater flexibility than traditional public schools, as they are exempt from many of the rules and regulations governing public schools. In theory, this autonomy should allow them to be more nimble and responsive to changing conditions. There is no better test of this than the COVID pandemic.
So how did charter schools perform during and after the pandemic? New research from Adam Kho, Shelby Smith, and Ron Zimmer, using student data from both charter and traditional public schools in Tennessee, suggests that they performed quite well.
Their analysis shows that during the 2020–21 school year, at the height of the pandemic, students in both charter and traditional public schools performed similarly—i.e., poorly. All schools were a mess during the pandemic. But in the two years that followed—the 2021–22 and 2022–23 school years—student learning in charter schools rebounded much more quickly than in traditional public schools.
To put these results in context, the authors note that charter schools were already outperforming traditional public schools in Tennessee prior to the pandemic. Given this, they interpret their post-pandemic results as follows: “in the first post-pandemic year . . . the [existing] charter school advantage . . . quickly resurfaced. In the second post-COVID year, the charter effect was even greater . . . suggesting that charter schools have been able to recover from pandemic-induced learning loss at a quicker and more substantial rate.” [emphasis added]
This evidence supports the idea that the less restrictive environment in which charter schools operate enables them to respond more effectively to challenging circumstances. The COVID pandemic was an extreme situation, but the same logic likely applies to the smaller, everyday challenges schools face.
