The charter school movement dates from the late 1980s and became a popular education reform tool in the 1990s. Some 3,000 charter schools exist today. Charter advocates made a number of claims regarding how charter schools would improve education. The charter, or contract, would free the school of many state and local district rules and regulations. Liberated from these onerous bureaucratic rules, charter schools would be more efficient and would also offer parents more choices. Most of all, the fundamental promise of charter schools was that they would improve achievement. The City of Buffalo, New York has proposed to establish a network of charter schools under the aegis of the district school board. This appears to be the first time a large urban area has made such a proposal. This report addresses what the research literature to date has said about the performance of charter schools. It reviews the record of charter schools in the context of six questions asked in the planning document, "Creating a Network of Charter Schools in Buffalo", prepared by the Education Innovation Consortium, a Buffalo think-tank, at the direction of the Buffalo School Board. [For the full report, see ED508468.]