Charter schools in Massachusetts have significantly accelerated student learning over the last quarter century, a newly released study shows. Compared with their counterparts in the state’s traditional public schools, charter students earned higher marks on state exams and the SAT, with particularly large gains in cities like Boston.
Notably, however, these effects fluctuated over time. After consistently outperforming district schools for more than a decade, MIT researcher Geoffrey Kocks found that charters forfeited their relative advantage entirely between 2015 and 2019, only to bounce back during the pandemic. By 2022, charters statewide once again enjoyed a meaningful edge, though not one as great as they exhibited before the slowdown.