Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schools appear to outperform but once you account for the fact that they can choose their students, removing all of the low performers and putting them in the public system, they no longer show a benefit.

This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford:

https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies

You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.

Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky.

I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.

So, it's certainly not the case that charters are uniformly better in every case. There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose). But what that does is it allows them the freedom to experiment with new styles of education, without filtering it through the bureaucracy of the union. In effect, that means there's going to be a lot more variation in outcomes amongst charters, particularly at first. Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools.

On the surface it's not obvious that this is attributable to the union. But if you dig in a little bit to what actually differentiates charter schools, the main thing is the absence of the teacher's union. At least, to my understanding, from operating in the space a little bit, and from people I know that operate more deeply in it than I did.

> There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose).

That's not the public position of charter schools. Charter schools are based on the idea that more flexibility will give better results, that has nothing to do with unions. The flexibility comes largely from not being pushed around by the school board and subject to testing and limits. Unions are willing to be flexible with education structure

The fact that most charter schools insist on no unions is what drives much of the opposition which sees them as a bad faith stalking horses for people who want to destroy union power. If charter schools were universally unionized there would be much less opposition!

Compare with magnet schools which are unionized. (But still have to deal with school board oversight)

> Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools.

I don't see the evidence for this. Studies show Charter schools perform no better then regular public schools. Some places that have really crappy public schools may try to turn to more charter schools on the chance that on average they might be better but I'd say reforming the regular school system would work better (even though it might be harder)

> That's not the public position of charter schools. Charter schools are based on the idea that more flexibility will give better results, that has nothing to do with unions. The flexibility comes largely from not being pushed around by the school board and subject to testing and limits. Unions are willing to be flexible with education structure

I agree that it's not the message they transmit. And i'm basically relying on my own personal experience and relationships for guidance here, so I don't necessarily expect you to be convinced. I'm just telling you what i've heard, and what my understanding is.

> I don't see the evidence for this. Studies show Charter schools perform no better then regular public schools. Some places that have really crappy public schools may try to turn to more charter schools on the chance that on average they might be better but I'd say reforming the regular school system would work better (even though it might be harder)

Read the studies I linked earlier in the thread. They do not perform the same.

Can you point to anything specific that addresses the objection raised? Nobody contests that brick and mortar charter schools have higher performance - the issues come down to the resources they receive and the fact that they have unique abilities to shape their admission.

It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble with exactly how they do this, of course.

The best k-12 schools in the US are in states that have teachers unions, so maybe go rethink your hypothesis.

That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence:

https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies

Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.

You can't take the stats of a charter school vs its district peers and extrapolate that to the state level. It's also notable that Massachusetts doesn't have a recent report.

I also took a look at the 2019 Washington (my state) press release with the following bullet point:

o School level findings identified several charter schools with significantly positive impacts, as much as 165 and 189 more days of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to the learning they would have realized in traditional public schools. Conversely, some charters significantly underperformed their local school options by as much as 106 and 83 fewer days of learning in reading and math, respectively

I'm not saying that charter schools aren't useful, what I am willing to say is that charter schools provide a good solution to a particular problem that has more to do school quality being tied to local tax revenue than unions.

I think it's more about options. Charter schools have the freedom to experiment with new ideas, which means their outcomes are likely to be more variable. Some will be better than traditional schools, some will be worse. But over time, that freedom to experiment should converge to an overall higher standard of education. At least, that's the theory, but the data seem consistent with that so far.