Charter Schools Lag, Study Finds

From an article of the same title by Jay Mathews in The Washington Post:

Fourth-graders in traditional public schools nationwide did somewhat better on average than those in charter schools in reading and mathematics in 2003, a long-awaited federal report said yesterday... The center looked at 6,764 traditional public schools and 150 charter schools, which are public schools that operate independently. It said traditional schools scored 4.2 points higher in reading and 4.7 points higher in math on the 500-point National Assessment of Educational Progress test for fourth-graders, after adjusting for such student characteristics as family income... The study emphasized that the results could have been distorted by several factors it could not adjust for, such as the lack of a random sample, different levels of parental support and different levels of learning before the students reached fourth grade.

The report is online here and in the summary says:

[The] analysis showed that in reading and mathematics, average performance differences between traditional public schools and charter schools affiliated with a public school district were not statistically significant, while charter schools not affiliated with a public school district scored significantly lower on average than traditional public schools.

There's also an article in the NY TImes here.