JACKSON, Miss. ( WJTV ) – A WJTV 12 News analysis reveals that many of Mississippi’s charter schools struggle to educate students adequately.

Charter schools are publicly funded, privately run, tuition-free public schools that operate independently of the local school district and with some autonomy over scheduling and curricula. Charter schools are usually pitched as institutions that provide better educational opportunities to students in underperforming districts. However, available data indicates this is not unilaterally true in Mississippi.

Mississippi’s charter schools taught more than 3,200 kindergarten through eighth-grade students in the 2022-2023 school year. Six of the state’s eight charter schools are in Jackson. The majority of each charter school’s student body is Black. The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) only had accountability grade data available on four of the eight charter schools in Mississippi. An MDE official told WJTV that other charter schools did not exist long enough to have the same data.

Of the four schools that MDE ranked , most performed worse academically than the school district they were located in. The Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board did not have a comparable ranking system for its schools in its annual report released in June. Listed below are available charter school accountability grades compared to their local school district in the 2022-2023 school year.

Jackson Public School District

• District grade: C
  • Smilow Prep: D
  • Midtown Public Charter School: F
  • Reimagine Prep: D
  • Smilow Collegiate: N/A
  • Ambition Prep: N/A
  • Revive Collegiate: N/A

Clarksdale Municipal School District

• District grade: D
  • Clarksdale Collegiate: D

Greenwood-Leflore Consolidated School District

• District grade: C
  • Leflore Legacy: N/A

According to the charter school board, six of Mississippi’s eight charter schools devoted less money per student than the public schools in the local school district. Five of those six schools are in Jackson, and the sixth was in Clarksdale. Five of the eight charter schools had higher student-to-faculty ratios than the public schools in the local school district. Four of those schools were in Jackson and one was in Clarksdale.

According to a report from Mississippi First, over 90% of charter school parents appear to be very satisfied with the school’s academic rigor. Over 87% of these parents gave their child’s charter school an A or B rating. In reality, academic performance compared to local public schools was mixed at best.

The charter school board found that students in Mississippi’s charter middle schools performed the same as traditional public school students in math and English Language Arts (ELA). Students in Mississippi’s charter elementary schools performed lower than traditional public school students in math and performed the same in ELA.

Rates of chronic absenteeism vary across the state’s charter schools. Chronic absenteeism rates declined for all charter elementary schools in the 2022-2023 school year. Chronic absenteeism rates among charter middle schools increased at Midtown, Smilow Prep and Leflore Legacy in 2022-2023. Midtown and Reimagine Prep had higher chronic absenteeism rates than the Jackson Public School District.

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