In their nascent stages, charter schools formed under competing ideologies. In academic circles, charter schools were envisioned as pedagogical laboratories that would allow for educator- and community-driven school improvement. In other circles, charter schools emerged as a free-market reform driven by accountability, choice, and growth. Amid the…

The meteoric rise in charter schools has several implications for traditional public schools and their students. One understudied implication is the geographic competition for students. Given traditional public school boundaries are often fixed while charter school boundaries are more flexible, charter schools can draw students away from existing…

Even with the increase in virtual learning, there remains a stigma that virtual schools are not successfully supporting students based on traditionally lower graduate rates and state assessment data. The problem is statewide educational decision-makers lacked an understanding of the prior academic performance, specifically credit attainment, among…

Debugging (or troubleshooting) provides a rich context to foster problem-solving. Yet, while we know much about some problems and strategies that novices face in programming on-screen, we know far less about debugging and troubleshooting in the context of physical computing, where coding issues may overlap with materially embedded problems. In…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, correlational study is to compare teachers' plans to leave the teaching profession for the school year 2021-22 in rural and urban area schools, and teachers' plans to leave the teaching profession for the school year 2021-22 in teachers with under and over fifteen years teaching experience. The…

This first of six briefs analyzing the latest available data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores enrollment of students with disabilities by school sector, state, grade level, and charter legal status--that is, operating as a local education agency (LEA) or as part of an LEA. The goal is to…

To promote a STEM career pipeline, a mentor outreach program was created within a K-12 charter school network, with a pilot year focusing on eighth and ninth-grade students. Utilizing a small cohort of volunteers from a nearby community college as student mentors and one faculty member, 12 visits were conducted throughout the school year. The…

Charter schools continue to expand, particularly in urban communities. To critique the civic side of charter schools, we applied Wilson's counter-public framework from a macro level to analyze the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)- Civics results. We employed a multilevel regression model to ascertain whether Black and…

In March 2020, COVID-19 appeared in the State of Maryland, resulting in strict stay-at-home orders and the shutting down of physical business operations. These restrictions directly impacted College Park Academy (CPA), a public charter middle and high school in Prince George's County, MD that typically follows a hybrid approach to in-person and…

In this paper, we investigate how student enrollment in public schools is different after the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the pandemic--between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years--about 12 percent of public elementary schools and 9 percent of middle schools experienced more than a 20 percent decline. This is a significant change from before the…

The charter school sector has expanded beyond brick-and-mortar schools to cyber schools, where enrollment grew almost tenfold between 2015 and 2020. While a large literature documents the effects of charter schools on test scores, fewer studies explore impacts on attainment or postsecondary outcomes and there is almost no work exploring the…

This qualitative case study examines the experiences of three Black female science teachers who experienced and participated in the triumphs and failings of today's charter school system while teaching Black and Brown students. Using Critical Race Theory and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy as frameworks, the findings of the study revealed that the…

One core feature of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) is a systems-level teaming process for coordinating staff implementation of evidence-based practices and monitoring student progress across all three tiers. Prior research has shown schools that report regular teaming and team-based data use are more likely to successfully…

Within the secondary level of education covering students in grades 6-12, reading comprehension continues to be an area of concern for traditional public-school educators. Because students lack the foundations of reading upon entering middle and high school, on average across the United States, many students struggle to meet high school graduation…

This second of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores enrollment of students with disabilities by race, gender, English proficiency, and primary disability to gain a fuller picture of educational equity. It is recognized that such categories can, at times, conceal as…