Charter schools said to lag on test scores

In the nation's first comparison of test scores between children in charter schools and regular public schools, students in traditional public schools fared better than similar students in charter schools, The New York Times reported today.

Fourth graders at charter schools lagged about six months behind students in other public schools in reading and math, the Times reported, citing data from the US Department of Education.

Researchers also found that students of particular races and ethnicities in charter schools, most of which are in cities, routinely performed worse than their counterparts in urban public schools, the newspaper reported.

The findings raise questions about the Bush administration's plan under the new federal education law, No Child Left Behind, which promotes the growth of charter schools.

The national findings also contradict a Globe analysis of state Department of Education statistics this spring that found that more than 60 percent of urban charter schools in Massachusetts outperformed traditional schools in their cities on the most recent MCAS exams. Of 26 urban charter schools, 16 outperformed their local school system's MCAS scores in 2003, at times by a significant margin.

Overall, charter schools across the state collectively did worse than traditional public schools. More than half of charter schools fell below average on math and English MCAS exams in 2003.

The findings reported by the Times were based on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress and were apparently provided by researchers at the American Federation of Teachers, which has historically supported charter schools but has recently raised doubts about expanding them.

Charter schools are self-governing public schools. They are often operated by private companies, which do not come under the authority of local school boards. They also retain more flexibility than traditional public schools in areas such as policy, hiring, and teaching.

Federal officials told the Times that they did not try to avoid publicizing the relatively poor performance of charter schools. They also denied any political motivation for failing to publicly release the data.

"I guess that was poor publicity on our part," Robert Lerner, the federal commissioner for education statistics, told the Times.

Critics of charter schools said the data underscores the shortcomings of such schools. "There's just a huge distance between the sunny claims of the charter school advocates and the reality," Bella Rosenberg, a special assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Times. "There's a very strong accountability issue here."

Today, charter schools serve more than 600,000 students at some 3,000 of the country's 88,000 public schools.

Charter schools have been promoted as an alternative to poorly performing public schools, but they have more recently been the sujbect of increasing concern.

More than 80 of the nation's charter schools have had to close, often because of questionable finances and lagging performance, Luis Huerta, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College told the Times.