ACADEMIC COMPETITION

Academic Competition

Academic Competition

A great deal of research has examined the effects of charter school competition on district-run schools, and some evidence can be found to support the assumption that competition would have positive effects; however, the literature is far from unanimous on this point. In a study of charter programs in Arizona and Michigan, traditional public schools responded to the competition of charter schools by raising their achievement and productivity, where productivity is defined as achievement per dollar spent, controlling for incoming achievement differences of the students (Bettinger, 2007).

This effect was found to be significant even when accounting for preexisting trends in achievement and productivity before the introduction of competition. Interestingly, the improvements in traditional public schools occurred once charter competition reached a level where reductions in enrollment began to create significant consequences for school staffing levels (Belfield, 2008). The author proposed a number of explanations for the positive relationship between competition and achievement/ productivity, including:

The financial pressures of competition may bid up the salaries of the best teachers, thus keeping people in teaching (or drawing new people into teaching) that would otherwise pursue other career paths;

The need to attract families may force schools to issue more information about their performance, resulting in more informed choices by parents;

In order to ensure high levels of satisfaction, schools may have to be more receptive to parent participation in school business; and

The pressure to produce results may force schools to abandon traditional pedagogical techniques and curricula that are found to be unsuccessful (Armor, 2008).

In North Carolina, nearly 100 new charter schools opened in a 3-year period in the late 1990s and researchers studying the impact of this new source of competition found significant test score gains in district-run schools as a result of the competition. The findings suggest that the closer a charter school is to a district-run school (i.e., the greater the competition), the greater the achievement gains.

At the same time, there is also research that reports mixed findings. For example, (Alves, 2007) linked charter school competition in Florida to a slight increase in math scores at nearby district-run schools, but found no change in reading scores. In addition, a review of research that examined more than 40 studies of the effects of the competition found that a number of these studies reported beneficial effects on student achievement while others reported no significant effects.

One explanation for the disparate results is that, ...