Students in fourth and eighth grades at New York City charter schools made larger strides than their peers at regular public schools this year on the statewide reading exam.

Of eighth-graders attending charter schools, fully 48.5% met or exceeded grade-level standards, up from 43.5% last year. That five-point improvement happened even as the proportion of eighth-graders at public schools throughout the city who met standards dropped by 2.8 percentage points, to 34% passing from 37% passing.

Among fourth-graders, whose percentage meeting or exceeding state standards this year jumped by 9.9 points citywide, the charter schools’ percentage passing soared by 13.2 points. With the big leap, 60.9% of fourth-graders at charter schools passed the exam administered this February, compared to 61% of public school students citywide.

The new data, compiled by the city Department of Education and released yesterday by the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, seem to offer an answer to a question repeatedly raised by opponents of charter schools: Do charter schools offer better educations than more traditional public schools?

“The performance of our children in charter schools is one of the many success stories in student achievement over the past year,” the chief executive of the Department of Education’s office of new schools, Kristen Kane, said. “The achievement gains of New York City children in charter schools should remind us of the importance of providing more options for our students.”

One of the elementary schools that outperformed citywide averages was Harlem Day Charter School, at which 100% of the school’s first class of fourth-graders scored at Level 3 or 4 on the exam, meaning they met or exceeded grade-level standards.

“I think that it’s a question of cumulative work,” the head of the school, Gwen Stephens, said. “Most of these students are the original cohort. We’ve been working with them, moving through the natural progression of reading and writing and academic development, looking very specifically at which goals need to be met in each grade level.”

At Harlem Day, most students attend school from 7:30 a.m. until 6 p.m., and they focus heavily on reading. The school also uses data to pinpoint learning problems and help individual students.

“This is a real starting-from-kindergarten kind of effort,” Ms. Stephens said. “You have to work together.” She said the strong parent involvement at the school was an important factor in the students’ success.

The CEO of the Center for Charter School Excellence, Paula Gavin, said she is excited about the performance of all New York City students, particularly the low-income, at-risk students who attend charter schools.

“These results underscore the great potential public charter schools have for raising standards of academic achievement,” she said.

A comparison of fourth-grade test results by the New York Charter School Association found that students at 11 of the 16 charter schools in the city outperformed the fourth-graders in the districts in which the schools are located. The comparison found that five of the six of the middle-school charter schools had eighth-graders who outperformed those in the surrounding district.