Getting the Educational Job Done.

• Author: Carden, Art

Charter Schools and Their Enemies

By Thomas Sowell

288 pp.; Basic Books, 2020

Thomas Sowell is a scholar and thinker who defies description and easy categorization. The best I can do is "intellectual juggernaut." On his 90th birthday, he published Charter Schools and Their Enemies, a data-driven evisceration of entrenched interests thwarting poor students' access to charter schools. It continues his long and venerable tradition of judging policies by their actual results rather than their merely hoped-for results. Charter schools are not the "magic bullet" solution to the nation's educational ills, but they deliver much better outcomes at a lower cost than traditional public schools--and teachers' unions hate them. That would be puzzling if educating children were what the debate is about. Sowell argues that it is not.

Performance / The book has two main themes: understanding charter schools' performance and understanding why they face opposition.

He tackles the former by carefully matching charter schools to comparable traditional public schools and comparing their results. This comparison is important because any claim that charter schools deliver better results at lower cost immediately runs into the objection that the students who attend the charters are different: they have different backgrounds, different degrees of family motivation, and so on. Sowell, of course, is aware of this and tries to make his comparisons as close to apples-to-apples as the data will allow. His statistical analysis probably would not pass muster at a technical economics journal like the Economics of Education Review, but this is a trade press book aimed at an audience of non-specialists. That said, his comparisons are consistent with more rigorous and sophisticated analyses by scholars like Stanford University's Caroline Hoxby. Charter schools, it appears, yield better performance.

About half of the book consists of commentary and analysis. The other half is comprised of data appendices that constitute an open invitation to both Sowell's friends and enemies to check his math using the data on which he bases his inferences.

He focuses on one of the lingering issues in education research: the black/ white "achievement gap." Black and Hispanic students tend not to perform as well on assessment tests as whites and Asians. He argues that while the reasons for this are extremely complex, one cannot overlook the elephant in the room: superlative performance by...