Giving Compass' Take:

• According to a new study, students in the charter networks in New Jersey's largest city showed improvement on standardized test scores compared to other students attending district-run schools.

• What does this imply for other charter networks? Is this a fair standard to judge district schools?

•  Learn why you need to go beyond test scores to evaluate charter and district schools.

Students assigned to most of the charter schools in New Jersey’s largest city showed greater improvements on standardized test scores in math and English than they would if they were placed in district-run schools, according to a new study. The findings are bound to reignite debates over whether charters are a net gain for a community, which often pit teachers unions and their allies against charter operators and their defenders.

Newark has a complicated relationship with charter schools. Its current school district superintendent has publicly asked the state to close charters in the city, citing concern that they drain the district of needed funds. Today, about a third of the city’s students attend a charter, which are operated by non-district organizations. The contentious issue of school choice in the city is punctuated by a $100 million donation from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that was faulted for pushing through controversial reforms without public input. Still, charters remain popular in the city, with nearly two-thirds of Newark voters holding a positive opinion of the city’s charter sector.

The study takes advantage of a rare opportunity for social science research: being able to measure the effect a policy has on a group of people who were picked to benefit from it at random.

Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California who was not a part of this study, called the results compelling.

“This is a well-designed and -executed study using high-quality methods,” Polikoff said. “We can be confident that these are causal effects of Newark charter schools.”

Read the full article about lasting gains in student test scores by Mikhail Zinshteyn at The 74.