Study of Charters in 8 States Finds Mixed Effects

A new study of hundreds of charter schools in eight states contains both good news and bad news for supporters of the nation’s roughly 4,600 public charter schools.

Contrary to critics’ fears, charter schools are not more racially segregated on average than nearby public schools in their communities, according to the study being released today by the RAND Corp., a research group based in Santa Monica, Calif. The study also says that the publicly funded but independently run schools don’t appear to be skimming the best students from local public systems. And in Florida and Chicago, at least, the research finds that charter school students seem to be more likely than public school students to graduate from high school and enroll in college.

But the researchers still found it difficult to determine whether charter school students on the whole were learning more, as measured by their test scores, than they would have in their regular public schools. That’s because most of the elementary schools lacked any base-line data for the kindergarten students they enrolled. When researchers looked at charter secondary schools, they found few differences in learning gains between students in charters...