Second Study Gives Thumbs Up to N.Y.C. Charters

Students in New York City’s charter elementary and middle schools make bigger learning gains than their regular public school counterparts in math and reading, according to the second report in five months to find good results for the independently run public schools in the nation’s largest school system.

The findings are attracting a lot of attention because they come from a Stanford University research group that issued a critical national study of charter schools last June. In that study , which looked at 2,403 charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, found that students in more than 80 percent of those schools performed the same as—or worse than—students in regular public schools on mathematics tests.

In contrast, CREDO’s new study, released...