"Facts are stubborn things," John Adams advised.
With the release of a study showing New York's charter schools are a big success - a study chock-full of stubborn facts - critics of charter schools in New York ought to be learning a lesson.
That's wishful thinking; the critics are simply adjusting their talking points to ignore a reckoning with the increasingly persuasive reality that charter schools are good for kids.
The most important finding of the new study - led by Prof. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University, in collaboration with colleagues from the Wharton School and the National Bureau of Economic Research - is that "a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English," with students attending for shorter periods of time realizing "commensurately smaller" gains.
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