Political discussions are often infected with false dichotomies, and the pros and cons of charter schools are not immune from this virus. Some charter advocates brazenly boast of the innate superiority of independent schools freed from the infirmities of union dystrophy. Some charter-detractors warn of the inundation of blood-sucking predators that leech district funding and ghettoize  hard-to-teach students in what Dmitri Mehlhorn calls “the architecture of charter skepticism.”

This sort of  reductive antithetical construction serves no one well: any reasonably informed observer  knows that there are good and bad charter schools, just like there are  good and bad traditional schools. Instead, what if we examined the availability of high-quality classroom seats, regardless of their governance structure, in a a city undergoing charter expansion?  After all, that’s what we’re all here for: access for all students to great schools.

Last month CRPE released a report called “Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities.”  The purpose of this analysis, says CRPE, is “to enable city leaders “to evaluate how well traditional district and charter schools are serving all their city’s children and how their schools compare to those in other cities.” Are achievement and opportunity gaps, especially in poor and high-minority cities, predetermined? Is is true, as some have concluded, that “poverty and racial inequities are conditions that schools cannot overcome”? Or do some cities beat the odds?

The results are mixed among these 50 cities.  Student performance  was mostly flat. Twenty-five percent of  high school students don’t graduate in four years.  Only 8% of students are enrolled in schools that out-performed similar schools. In 29 cities less than 10% of students were enrolled in advanced math classes.

But not in Newark, one of the few cities that fall into that prestigious category of “beating the odds.” In fact, if you aggregate Newark’s “beat the odds” schools (charter and traditional), Newark is the best-performing urban district in the country.

In other words, the expansion of charter schools in Newark has helped all children, regardless which school they attend. This conclusion may appear startling to those who follow anti-charter folk in N.J.. After all, don’t schools like KIPP and Uncommon “cream off” top students? Don’t they leech scarce money from district coffers? Don’t they push out hard-to-teach kids, those with disabilities or those new to the English language?

Let’s look at the data. According to CRPE, in the fifty cities studied, only 8% of students were placed in schools that “beat the odds.” In Newark, the percentage was 40%, making this district a true outlier.

Compared to other cities studied, Newark was the leader in students placed in “beat the odds” public schools and “beat the odds” traditional schools. For example, while only 8% of students across the 50 cities were enrolled in schools that outperformed schools statewide over the last three years, in Newark about one out of three students was enrolled in schools that outperformed similar schools statewide.