the people I know who study this issue are opposed to charters because they only perform well under certain criteria -- but these criteria aren't confined to charters, so you obtain these conditions in conventional public school settings. When I get a chance later this week (?), i'm going to write about Gerry Grant's new book, Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh. As I mentioned earlier, the approach taken by Raleigh schools was to treat class as a salient cultural difference -- and Walter Benjamin thinks that's a no-no. I, of course, have deep disagreements with Grant in the sense that he's a Liberal and I'm a Marxist, but if you're going to stay within a Liberal framework.
the other thing is, private schools do well _because_ they have resources. When you take private catholic schools as the proxy for how private schools might perform under ordinary circumstances -- without huge wads of cash and high tuition -- then Catholic schools barely do better than public schools and sometimes perform worse. That's data from an old study, though, so maybe they've updated it. shag