Student Engagement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Student engagement – attendance, drop out, and graduation rates – with schooling has been a major concern since the COVID-19 pandemic.  While drops in engagement in traditional public schools (TPS) have been widely chronicled, little is known about charter schools. With more operational flexibility, charter schools could potentially keep students more engaged in the face of major disruptions like the pandemic. Using school-level data from 38 states, we compare engagement measures in TPS and charters, finding that engagement deteriorated by similar magnitude in both school sectors on average. Controls for student demographics, school attributes, district and community characteristics or state and district fixed effects explain 40-60% of the variation in student engagement, but they have no impact on the estimated relative changes in student engagement between charter schools and TPS. These relative changes, however, vary substantially across states.