Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Can Charter Schools Make Kids Richer?

Take with a grain of salt the new study from Mathematica Policy Research that found that alumni of charter high schools in Florida and Chicago made nearly 13 percent more per year in their mid-20s than graduates of traditional public schools.

February 4, 2014 at 4:47 PM UTC

By Tobin Harshaw

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

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The best indicator of whether an education initiative is successful is, obviously, classroom achievement by the students involved. Other data are often just noise: For example, it's interesting that children enrolled in Head Start may be less likely to take to crime as adults, but it's pretty much irrelevant to judging the efficacy of an expensive government program that's failed to show much in terms of student performance.

So temper the enthusiasm for a much-discussed new study from Mathematica Policy Researchthat found that alumni of charter high schools in Florida and Chicago made nearly 13 percent more per year in their mid-20s than graduates of traditional public schools. Yes, bigger paychecks are probably a better measure of a program's success than keeping out of prison, but is it really the goal here? (Especially given how random the incomes of 20-somethings are; after all, someone in business or engineering graduate school probably has a low income at 25.)