A paper published on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that students in Harlem who were selected by lottery to attend the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy, a charter school, performed better academically and had fewer societal problems than their peers who attended regular public schools in Harlem. All of the students in the study were from low-income families.
The results showed that students who were enrolled in the charter school, which had a longer school year than the public schools, were 49 percent more likely than their peers in public school to go on to college. The charter schools students were less likely to become pregnant and less likely to become involved in the criminal justice system than their public school peers.
The paper, “The Medium-Term Impacts of High-Achieving Charter Schools on Non-Test Score Outcomes,” may be accessed here. The authors of the report are Ronald Fryer, the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Will Dobbie, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
