What can you believe about charter schools?

For now, the debate over allowing charter schools has faded in Maine. Outside the state, however, a charter schools debate rages on.

What truly is the effect of the independently managed schools on student performance?

Do they boost student achievement, leaving traditional public school students in the dust? Do they produce results that are mostly the same as traditional public schools'? Or are charter schools actually failing students?

Whatever your belief about charter schools, a study or op-ed in recent weeks has backed it up.

Those who strongly back charter schools would have been pleased to read Jon Keller's op-ed in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Boston Mayor Tom Menino has become a strong charter schools advocate in recent months, Keller notes. It's a change of heart backed up with sound reasoning, Keller says. A recent report released by the Boston Foundation and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education noted "that students admitted to charter schools were doing much better than the children they left behind in regular public schools," he writes.

Education policy observers who aren't swayed by either side would have found their viewpoint supported in Ken Jones' essay Sunday in the Maine Sunday Telegram. "The growing body of data on existing charter schools throughout the
country does not show any greater achievement in such schools," writes Jones, a professor at the University of Southern Maine.

I blogged recently about a report from Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes. That analysis took a look at charter schools in 16 states and found mixed results with regard to student performance. In Minnesota, for example, the CREDO study found charter school students under-performed their traditional public school counterparts.

What's to account for these disparate outcomes?

Different data sets, for one. The Stanford study, for example, doesn't take a look at student performance at charter schools in Massachusetts. The Boston Foundation report focuses exclusively on Boston.

Charter school advocates in Maine are likely to try once again to get a charter school law passed come January, once the state Legislature reconvenes.

One task for them in convincing the unconvinced is to settle these data disputes. In addition, they might draw more parallels between the charter school system they want to set up in Maine and the top-performing charter school systems in the United States.

In the Maine Legislature, though, their battle is still an uphill one.