Private and charter schools instill “civic values” as well as public schools do, according to a new analysis of recent studies on the topic.

A group of researchers recently began an effort to find out how private and charter schools compare to public schools on measures of “civic values” such as political knowledge, tolerance, and participation in a series of studies. A professor at the University of Arkansas who studies school choice, Patrick Wolf, has now compiled their findings for the summer issue of Education Next, a journal published by the Hoover Institution.

“There is a strong expectation or assumption that public schools will outperform private and charter schools in instilling civic values because they’re government run,” Mr. Wolf said. Instead, he said, his meta-study “suggests that school choice programs are performing as well as traditional public schools or in many cases outperforming them.”

In the ongoing “school choice” debate over private school vouchers and charter schools, researchers have produced numerous studies about how charters and private schools measure up to traditional public schools when it comes to test scores and dismantling segregation.

But after a flurry of research in the 1960s about civic values, such studies largely died out, said a Columbia University education professor who also studies school choice and reform, Jeffrey Henig.

Now, with charter schools on the rise — a study by the Center for Education Reform released last week showed there was an 11% increase last year in charter schools nationwide — questions about how school choice policies affect a democratic society beyond academic achievement have begun to regain traction.

“The mission of schooling, especially in America, goes beyond just boosting learning and achievement,” Mr. Henig said.

For a handful of education researchers, especially those supportive of vouchers and charter schools, the issue of how well choice schools educate future citizens came to a head when Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote his dissent in the 2002 Zelman voucher case, which upheld a private school voucher program in Ohio.

In the dissent, Mr. Breyer wrote that he feared vouchers risk “creating a form of religiously based conflict potentially harmful to the Nation’s social fabric.”

The researchers, including Mr. Wolf, set out to find out whether he was right.

In his meta-study, which draws together 59 findings from recent studies, Mr. Wolf said the evidence now shows that Mr. Breyer may have been wrong. Among 22 studies of political tolerance, for example, 11 studies showed that students at “schools of choice,” which include private, parochial, and charter schools, are more tolerant of people who are different from themselves than students at traditional public schools.

The studies showed some differences between types of private schools, with charter schools more associated with voluntarism in one study, while secular private school students were found to be less patriotic in another. Protestant evangelical school students were more likely to be politically knowledgeable, but less likely to be tolerant, other studies showed.

Overall, Mr. Wolf said he found that the majority of the studies bore out the argument that private and charter schools do better at promoting civic values, while most of the rest were neutral.

“The initial findings are very supportive of school choice,” he said.

Mr. Henig, who said he had reviewed a preliminary copy of Mr. Wolf’s paper, suggested that the findings should be taken with a grain of salt given the pro-school-choice leanings of some of the researchers who created the studies — half of whom have worked both with Mr. Wolf and each other on projects.

“I’m not suggesting that they’re cooking the data or anything, but they’ve been the folks who have been finding pro-choice things along a range of indicators,” Mr. Henig said. “They’ve created a meta-analysis of their own work and concluded they were right. I think there’s a problem with that.”

Mr. Wolf readily acknowledged that many of the researchers had worked together: “It’s true that there is a core group of school choice researchers that have produced several of the studies,” he said.

But he added that he isn’t afraid to publish findings that contradicted his assumptions, noting that one of the negative findings on patriotism in private and charter schools was his own.

Both Mr. Henig and Mr. Wolf do say that the research is only preliminary, and important — with Mr. Henig acknowledging that researchers are right to question “the kind of knee-jerk criticism of choice by opponents.”