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Indiana’s charter school students have experienced greater academic growth in the years following the pandemic than their peers in traditional public schools, according to a new preliminary analysis.
The study from eight researchers posted through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute also found that the gains were particularly pronounced for Black and Hispanic students, and for those who were among the lowest-performing and economically disadvantaged.
The findings could hold important lessons for how schools can recover from learning loss, and have sparked researcher interest in what tactics charter leaders adopted to do that. While there are many studies examining the impact of charter schools on student outcomes, the authors note that there has been almost no research on charter school performance since the pandemic.
The findings tracked students from 2017-18 to 2023-24, focusing on how ILEARN test scores improved from their baseline levels during the pandemic in 2020-21. They have prompted researchers to examine how certain schools responded in the years immediately following the 2020-21 school year.
“What really matters is, what is it that these schools were doing?” said Joseph Waddington of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame, one of eight authors of the study. “We’re not so much interested in telling a story of how did this sector (perform) versus the other sector — we want to understand why. We want to understand the variation.”
The analysis, which is undergoing peer review, examined students who stayed in brick-and-mortar charter schools and in traditional public schools throughout the entire study period.
Charter students were matched with traditional public school peers who most closely resembled them based on a variety of factors, including their socioeconomic status, geographic location, and their 2021 ILEARN test score.
Most of the state’s charter schools are in Indianapolis, but the study also examined all counties in which charter schools are present. The analysis included few rural students, Waddington said, because of the lack of charters in those areas.
During the 2020-21 school year, charter students performed the same as their traditional public school peers in math and modestly outperformed them in English, according to the study. But after 2020-21, charter students outperformed traditional public students in all years in English, and nearly all years in math.
The difference was modest in 2021-22, but grew in 2022-23 and 2023-24, according to the study.
“The findings in this analysis suggest a shift occurred during the pandemic and its aftermath,” the study concludes. “Not only are students in Indiana’s charter schools experiencing more accelerated test score gains than their (traditional public school) peers, but these impacts appear to be growing over time in the post-pandemic period.”
Chronic absenteeism and instructional delivery — whether in-person or virtual — did not account for the differences in achievement, the study found. Charter schools were more likely to offer virtual learning for more of the 2020-21 school year than traditional public schools.
In Indianapolis, charter schools as a whole have posted higher rates of Black and Hispanic students reaching proficiency in both math and English, compared with those run by Indianapolis Public Schools, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of the 2025 ILEARN results.
The study’s authors are examining what could contribute to the differences in outcomes between charters and traditional public schools by surveying school leaders in both sectors across Indiana, Waddington said.
The changes could be attributed to additional instructional time, or differences in instructional type, such as having students spend more time in smaller pull-out groups, he said. He also said some schools may have added certain types of staff, or utilized certain partnerships to bring in tutors.
The study’s findings mirror broader research on charter school students’ performance that finds positive impacts for Black students, those from lower-income households, and the lowest-performing students, Waddington said.
But the researchers are hoping to learn more details from survey results about how schools responded to COVID learning loss.
“There may be something in the story about differences in how the sectors responded to the pandemic that can actually be illustrative for all sectors going forward in terms of best practices associated with learning loss recovery,” he said.
Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.
Amelia Pak-Harvey 2026-05-20 11:00:00
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