Whether adopting charter-system status — a performance-based contract in exchange for waivers and school-level governance — improved state standardized test passing rates, 2004–2014.
A panel of 172 Georgia school districts (17 charter systems, 155 controls), 2004–2014. Charter-system status from GADOE; state standardized test (CRCT) passing rates from GOSA; covariates and student composition from NCES CCD and GOSA.
Becoming a charter system did not improve state standardized test passing rates in reading or math for grades 3, 5, or 8. Only 8th-grade math passing rates rose, by 1.6 percentage points, and that estimate is only weakly significant (p < 0.10) with a 95% confidence interval still containing zero. The null results are consistent with prior work (Williams et al., 2020) and suggest that incentives and regulatory flexibility alone — without addressing performance measurement, enforcement, and governance capacity — do not move outcomes.