We survey 137 charter school administrators and 129 board members and find that U.S. charter school internal controls are perceived to be relatively strong overall. However, board independence, board communication of internal control responsibilities to school personnel, lines of communication between the board and school personnel, and reporting…

"Voting with Their Feet: A State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" shows hundreds of thousands of families switched to charter schools during the first full school year of the pandemic. During the 2020-21 school year, charter school enrollment grew 7%, the largest increase in half a…

In the past 20 years, both school choice policies and dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs have proliferated across the US. This project examines the intersection of the two trends, examining how school choice policies have shaped DLBE at the district, school, and program level, through the eyes of 22 public school administrators in…

Given that independent schools have started to face competition from charter schools, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) commissioned a study with current and prospective charter school parents to determine their perceptions of charter vs. independent schools, assess the relative impact of the variables that affect their school…

This report is the result of a year-long exploration of the effects of charter schools and the issues that surround them. Each of its eleven issues-based stories tells what the Network for Public Education (NPE) has learned not only from research, but also from talking with parents, community members, teachers, and school leaders around the nation…

This report summarizes the state of competition in American K-12 education. It pays particular attention to the prevalence and market penetration of charter schools, private school vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships as market reforms. The effect of added institutional competition from charters, vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships on the…

Currently, restrictive-language policies seem to threaten bilingual education throughout the USA. Anti-bilingual education initiatives have passed easily in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, while one was closely defeated in Colorado, and federal education policy has re-invigorated the focus on English education for English language…

To date, few studies have quantitatively examined within-group differences among charter schools. This is largely due to the lack of a workable typology with which to describe and classify schools. This study fills that gap with a two dimensional typology constructed from a sample of 1182 charter schools in five states--Arizona, California,…

This paper uses the charter-school legislation of three states-Arizona, California, and Michigan--as a lens to understand the policy values embodied in school--choice reforms. It questions the prevailing rubrics of the Center for Education Reform and the American Federation of Teachers. Briefly stated, the former ranks laws as either…

Among the major concerns surrounding school-choice programs is their potential to stratify students along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class. The latest among four U.S. Department of Education national evaluations of charter schools reports no evidence that charter schools are predominantly white or that they segregate…