Despite Indiana's school choice landscape -- including private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, inter-district and intra-district enrollment, magnet schools, and charter schools -- not all Indiana communities have reasonable access to options outside of their traditional public schools. This research explores what lack-of-reasonable…

Recent advocacy and legislation across states calls for stricter accountability measures and closure of low-performing charter schools. As charter schools try to meet the multiple accountability standards they face from federal, state, local authorities, and their own associations, it is important to understand how these numerous frameworks…

The role of political factors, specifically of public opinion, in the relatively low penetration of charter schools into rural America remains unclear. We use 8 years of national survey data to demonstrate that rural residents express less support for charter schools than residents of other locales do. We attribute this gap to differences in…

The national debate over charter schooling has become increasingly heated in 2016, driven by polarized narratives about the students charters typically serve. Opponents argue charters cream-skim more advantaged students, while proponents hold they primarily serve historically disadvantaged students. National evidence on charter student selectivity…

Theory suggests that charter schools may affect neighboring traditional public schools either positively or negatively. Empirical findings are mixed, which may be due to variation in the policy context or estimation approach. Our contribution is in considering a new measure of charter penetration and comprehensive methodology. We combine the…

The central tenet of this investigation is that educational institutions possess their own school identity. Acknowledging that school identity is influenced by institutional mechanisms and personal dynamics, we examine school identity in the context of 13 Alberta charter schools. Narratives of 73 educational stakeholders across the network of…

The State of Alaska, by some measures the United States' most rural state, has long supported correspondence schools, a popular school choice option available to all students statewide and used primarily by homeschooled students. This paper first explores Alaska correspondence schools in historical context, and then quantifies capture rate,…

In this paper, we discuss some concerns and recommendations of Saultz and Fusarelli (2017), offering nuanced and detailed views of online schooling from a different perspective. This includes addressing challenges regarding online learning such as fluctuating enrollments, financial concerns, quality assurance, and accountability. In addition, we…

Charter schools are often the only alternative to traditional public schools for students with disabilities in rural communities. Part of a larger study, we employed a qualitative multiple case study design to examine special education practices in five rural charter schools to understand the services provided, barriers to providing these…

This article explores the importance of considering transportation mode when calculating commute time for a child's school choice options. While proponents of school choice argue that students can attend any school that will provide them the best education, several have argued that commute time is as important for families as a school's…

Over the past decade U.S. policymakers, practitioners, and researchers have sought to examine if changing teacher evaluation policies and systems have resulted in changes in identifying quality teachers and/or increased student achievement. This research generally shows most states have experienced little change in how teachers are rated.…

A large body of research on school choice has examined whether choice-based policies reproduce and exacerbate existing racial and socioeconomic inequalities. While many states have enacted multiple school choice policies at once, most of these studies focus on a single choice-based policy. This study examines enrollment patterns in Detroit in the…

The charter-school sector in the United States has grown steadily since the first charter school opened in 1992 and nearly 7,000 charter schools currently serve nearly 3 million students. Research suggests that the average charter school performs about the same as nearby traditional public schools, but there is great variation in the effects of…

Opponents of charter schools argue these schools "cream-skim" the best students from traditional public schools and push out hard-to-educate students. This paper reviews 22 studies of enrollment issues related to student achievement, special education status, English proficiency, and student discipline in US charter schools. Of the 22…

This literature review compares the current knowledge about the characteristics of effective charter schools to findings from the broader body of effective school research. We find that lists of effectiveness characteristics from the charter and traditional literatures are well aligned: good schools seem to look the same, regardless of governance…