N.Y.C. Charters Found to Close Gaps

New York City’s charter schools are making strides in closing achievement gaps between disadvantaged inner-city students and their better-off suburban counterparts, a new study concludes .

The study, conducted by Stanford University researcher Caroline M. Hoxby and her co-authors Sonali Mararka and Jenny Kang, is based on eight years of data for students applying to the city’s growing number of charter schools. It finds, for instance, that attending a charter school from kindergarten to 8th grade can close the achievement gap with a similar student in the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, N.Y., by 86 percent in mathematics and 66 percent in reading. By comparison, the “Harlem-Scarsdale” gap only widens over the same span of grades for students who remain in regular public schools, according to the study.

For high school students, the study also found, attending a charter school increased the likelihood that a student would earn a state Regents diploma by age 20 by 7 percent for each year...