The "Knowledge Is Power Program" ("KIPP") is a nonprofit network of more than 200 public charter schools educating early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school students. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) identified four studies of "KIPP" that fall within the scope of the Charter Schools topic area and meet…

A Toolkit of Emerging Best Practices and Opportunities for Charter Support Organizations Approximately 6.4 million students--roughly 13 percent of the student population between ages 6-21--receive special education and related services in public schools every year. While students identified as eligible for special education require supports and…

This paper presents findings from a yearlong exploratory mixed-methods research study that investigates a national sample of six (6) intentionally diverse charter organizations. Intentionally diverse charter schools work against national public schooling trends to deliberately promote socioeconomically and racially integrated schooling spaces.…

Almost immediately after schools closed due to the coronavirus outbreak in spring 2020, we began to see anecdotal evidence that charter schools were reacting quickly and serving students well. This paper offers evidence that smaller networks and schools that represent over 65% of the charter school landscape were able to respond quickly and take…

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has long focused on making school choice work. Parents of children with disabilities face greater barriers to choosing schools for their children. This brief is the first installment in a series of reports examining how parents of children with disabilities experience the process of choosing schools. The…

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4)…

With the passage of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states were required to add a fifth indicator on "School Quality or Student Success" (SQSS) to their school accountability systems. An analysis of submitted ESSA state plans found that 13 states included measures of school climate as their SQSS indicator or incorporated…

Charter schools face high-stakes accountability. When charter schools fail to perform as expected, including as measured on state tests, authorizers are often expected to close them. While the details of charter school oversight are shaped by each state's charter school policy, federal law influences how states test children and evaluate all…

The poor quality of many school systems is a serious impediment to social mobility for children from low-income and minority families, who cannot easily pick up and move to communities with good schools. The number of students taking college remediation classes has soared, and too many students graduate high school underprepared to enter either…

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. secretary of education, is a strong proponent of allowing public education dollars to go to private schools through vouchers, which enable parents to use public school money to enroll their children in private schools, including religious ones. Vouchers are advanced under the rubric of "school choice"--the…

This memo, which is the seventh in the series, features an interview with the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at the Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington, DC. Originally planned as a piece analyzing the long-term work of the school, this memo was redesigned to feature an interview highlighting how the school rapidly responded to…

Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to "virtual learning" was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do…

Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School is considered to be the elder statesman among dual-language public charter elementary schools in Washington, D.C. It is old by charter school standards: Stokes was founded in 1998, well before the charter school boom of the 2000s, with just thirty-five students. It now serves 485…

This multi-case study seeks to understand the experiences of New York City and Washington, DC public charter school principals who have experienced leadership coaching, a component of leadership development, beyond their novice years. The research questions framing this study address how experienced public charter school principals describe the…

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned WestEd to develop a guide on using quality authorizing to promote high-quality charter schools. At the time, notions about how authorizers could contribute to the existence of such schools were in their infancy, and the publication, which profiles the oversight practices of eight selected…