Julian Betts is a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, and executive director of the San Diego Education Research Alliance (SanDERA), and an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. He has devoted 21 years to collaborative research that has evaluated many education interventions designed to assist disadvantaged groups. He has directed a lottery-based study of public school choice programs in San Diego and is currently studying both the short- and long-term impacts of winning school choice lotteries. He holds a PhD in economics from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
This report infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance and finds that whether charters outperform traditional public schools depends on the location, grade, and subject.
This paper analyzes existing charter outcome studies and finds that there is great variety in charter school performance, with charters outperforming in some grade spans/subjects and underperforming in others.
This paper provides an analysis of 14 charter school studies that use the two most rigorous methods: either randomization based on lotteries, or value-added modeling.
This white paper from the Charter School Achievement Consensus Panel examines the existing research on student achievement in charter schools and details how future research could be improved.