Politicians and others often frame a narrative that charters are on par or better than traditional public schools. I have discussed how charters stack up traditional public schools extensively in posts here on CI on charters. Are there charters that are islands of excellence? Of course, there are some and I discussed this in my invited testimony last week at the Texas Senate. But we must hold charters accountable to data— not just achievement data— because it is becoming clearer and clearer that many charters have high attrition.

Although, the Texas Education Agency doesn’t calculate and disseminate attrition rates, you can basically do it yourself here.  Table 5 is where the information lies.

Below is a table for the central Texas area that an anonymous reader produced and emailed me, not holding graduates against schools, but otherwise looking at attrition rates.

A Mathematica KIPP study that came out recently…