This document looks at the increasing popularity of charter schools for intradistrict school choice. During 2000, about 1,700 charter schools were serving some 250,000 students in the United States. Charter schools typically begin as preexisting schools or as "startups" born with charters. States seem to have ambivalent attitudes toward charter schools, having either "strong" or "weak" laws on their books. A recent study shows that charter legislation thrives in states with a policy encouraging entrepreneurship, poor test scores, Republican legislative control, and proximity to other strong-law states. As a whole, charter schools are somewhat more racially diverse, serve a slightly higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students, and serve a slightly lower proportion of disabled and limited-English-proficiency students than do other public schools. They are havens for children with bad educational experiences and have stimulated improvements in the broader education system; most districts respond with energy to charter-school initiatives. As regards quality of education, statewide evaluations of charter schools in Colorado, Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan, California, and New Jersey show mixed results, though some programs are too new to draw strong conclusions. Some innovative charter programs that are described include residential schools and cyber charter schools. Other issues that are covered here include implementation problems, equity, governance and regulatory issues, accountability, staffing policies, church-state issues, and key policy issues. (Contains 89 references.) (RJM)