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parents taking advantage of school choice may take a significant toll on the schools they leave behind. According to research at Michigan State University by economist David Arsen and former student Yongmei Ni, Michigan is the only state where a high number of charter schools within a single district leads to lower academic performance in the local traditional school.

"In areas where there has been intense charter competition that has been sustained over more than five years, which includes most of the urban districts in the state, we observed a significant negative impact on the performance of the children who remained behind in traditional public schools," Arsen said. These districts tended to have five or more charter schools.

He said students in such districts appeared to be a half year farther behind in math and a year farther behind in reading than expected.

Arsen suspects the way Michigan funds schools, with money following the student out of a district to a charter school, may be to blame. The district still has to spend the same amount on utilities and other infrastructure costs, leading to less money to spend on instruction. That means fewer teachers, larger class sizes and fewer electives.

Charter schools are largely credited with Detroit Public Schools' drastic drop in enrollment and at least partly blamed for the subsequent $305-million deficit. In the last decade, the district has lost 46% of its enrollment, falling to about 95,000 students today. The district loses more than $7,500 for each student who leaves.

The declining performance in some public schools does not mean that charter schools are, as a whole, outperforming them. For example, a Free Press analysis of 2008 MEAP results for grades K-8 found 58% of charter schools scored worse on the language portion of the MEAP than the local district. And 56% of charter schools scored worse than the local schools on the math test.

Comparing high school results is complicated because charter high school students are about three times as likely to be in alternative programs. The results show 83% of charter high schools scored worse than their local district on the language portion of the MME, and 82% scored worse on math.

Those results were alarming enough for the state to call for more study of charter high schools.

Some say that charters should be performing better than traditional schools, especially in the urban areas where three-quarters of charter schools are located, because they often have a lower percentage of students living in poverty than the local district.

Charter school advocates say the students entering their schools already are far behind, hampering their test scores. Critics say charter test scores lag because some charter schools are simply academically poor schools.

The results are mixed in the final promise of charter schools -- that of spreading educational innovation.

The Michigan Association of Public School Academies listed 23 of the state's 232 charter schools as innovative.

The list includes a broad range of theme schools, including an English immersion school for Muslim students, a school with a German foreign exchange program, one that allows students to graduate only when they have been accepted to a four-year university, and schools with arts, environmental or career orientations.

Most of the innovative charter schools are theme schools, and their popularity is part of the reason why many traditional districts now offer similar theme programs.

But competition has prevented innovations that directly impact the classroom for most students from spreading between charter and traditional schools. In some cases, private companies that run some charter schools prohibit teachers from sharing tips with other schools, calling it the company's intellectual property, Miron said.

And it is hard to find educators in traditional public schools who say they believe they can learn anything from charter schools.

"I haven't heard of anything specifically coming out of a charter school that's so different or so innovative that we aren't doing in traditional schools," said Kristina Sobota, a literature teacher at Dakota High School in Macomb Township.

Educators agree that wall between charter schools and traditional schools needs to come down.

"It was set up like that in the beginning and it's a shame, because we all should be collaborating to achieve the best," said Margaret Trimer-Hartley of the competition. She's seen the issue from both sides, currently as superintendent of the University Prep Science and Math System, a charter school in Detroit. Before that, she was a frequent charter school critic as spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, the state's largest teachers union.

Kaye Mentley, superintendent of Grand Traverse Academy in Traverse City, sees a chance for that to change. She said she meets regularly with school superintendents in her area to compare data and ideas. And she says she hopes the gap can be bridged for teachers.

"Do teachers learn from each other? Probably not," she said. "We don't have the vehicle for doing that."