In the heated debate over charter schools, advocates insist charters are a beneficial alternative that especially helps economically disadvantaged students, while critics doubt these touted achievements. This new book, co-published by the Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, sheds much-needed light on the effectiveness of charter schools by analyzing current research and data to show how they perform compared to regular public schools. The Charter School Dust-Up looks at national data and studies in 13 states to investigate charter school enrollment and achievement.

Debates spurred by federal charter school test data show how all debates about education could be improved: by carefully accounting for the difficulty of educating particular groups of students before interpreting test scores, and by focusing on student gains, not their level of achievement at any particular time.