What "Beats" means here
Ranking charter schools by raw proficiency mostly ranks them by the families they enroll. To compare a charter to the district schools it actually competes with, we use BeatsExpectations: a per-state regression of school proficiency on free-and-reduced-lunch share. It predicts the proficiency a school "should" post given its poverty profile, and the residual, in percentage points, is how far above or below that line the school actually lands. A charter at +15 is beating its demographics; one at -15 is trailing them. The table above ranks every scored California charter on that residual. Sort ascending to see the weakest performers.
How California charters compare to district schools
The headline stat is the charter sector's average residual minus the district sector's. A positive number means California charters, on average, beat their demographics by more than the state's district schools do; a negative number means they trail. The national picture is genuinely mixed: charters beat district schools handily in some states (New York is the clearest case) and trail them badly in others (Ohio and Pennsylvania, where troubled cyber-charter sectors drag the average down). See the national report for every state side by side.
Limits
BeatsExpectations controls for poverty, but not for everything that separates charters from district schools: charters can have application and lottery processes, different special-education and English-learner shares, and different mid-year attrition. A high residual is strong evidence a school is doing something right, but it is not proof the same students would have done worse down the street. Treat this as the fairest single comparison available from public data, not a settled verdict on school choice.
Source data
NCES Common Core of Data 2024-25 (charter flag, FRL share, enrollment) and California's native state assessment for the most recent available year. The BeatsExpectations regression is recomputed after every data refresh.