This report explains how State Entity (SE) Program grantees are using or proposed to use the technical assistance (TA) set-aside portion of their Charter School Programs (CSP) funds for these activities. This report also describes SE activities to ensure subgrantees are equipped to meet the needs of all students, and specifically students with…

School improvement in chronically under-performing schools remains a formidable challenge for school leaders. Recent policies in the U.S. have created incentives for school leaders to attempt new strategies to improve outcomes, and increasingly, school leaders of charter management organizations and other multi-school organizations (MSOs) are…

In this article, we use originally collected survey data to determine how nonprofit charter school board members in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota define accountability. We find that charter board members generally define accountability downward toward student achievement and staff performance, inward toward board performance, or…

This report provides an introduction to the role and responsibilities of charter boards in the New Orleans public education system. Geared towards families, it explains the difference between charter boards and the Orleans Parish School Board, provides a list of all operational charter boards in the city, and answers some common questions…

This eleventh edition of "Measuring up to the Model: A Ranking of State Charter School Laws" presents the latest activity in charter public school legislation across the country. This report evaluates each state's public charter school law against the 21 essential components of a strong charter school law. These 21 components are drawn…

Academisation of schooling in England is a significant development with consequences for the disavowal of the role of community and democracy in education at the local level and wider resonance for geo-policy jurisdictions where neoliberal education reforms play out. This study analyses the operation of power and control of Multi Academy Trust…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

Against the backdrop of the debate around exclusionary discipline practices, this case study asks readers to consider how leaders must balance autonomy with concerns about accountability and equity. In this case, a traditional public school principal in search of more autonomy accepts a principalship at a charter school, but as she attempts to…

This study explores how the college-going culture at a no-excuses charter school with high college enrollment rates shaped students' worldviews and trajectories. Drawing on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I found that the school boosted college enrollment through student compliance to the college accountability policies rather than through the…

The audit objective for this report was to determine whether the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PA Education) and selected Pennsylvania local educational agencies have sufficient internal controls to ensure that individualized education programs (IEP) are developed in accordance with Federal and State requirements for children with…

The impacts of the 2018 elections were felt in the 2019 state legislative sessions across the country. While charter school supporters continued to rack up legislative victories on increasing funding and facilities support, strengthening accountability, and protecting autonomy, they also faced political climates in several states that were…

Charter schools because of their entanglements with privatization remain one of the most publicly contested and controversial educational reform initiatives. Charter schools, in theory, are to balance autonomy and accountability in order to provide students with innovative learning environments and increased achievement on traditional academic…

Through an ethnographic case study within one struggling Afrocentric public charter school in the Mid-Atlantic from 2009 to 2011, I show how broader neoliberal reforms and an incomplete attempt at Afrocentric education combined to redefine Blackness as poverty, danger, and failure through the co-optation of school-based practices. Using a Critical…

In 2018, the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation issued a report entitled "Grading the States." That report examined America's commitment to democracy by grading each state and the District of Columbia on the number of publicly-funded but privately-governed educational "choice" programs it had and whether…

The Charter Schools Program (CSP) is the nation's only source of dedicated federal funding to support the creation, expansion, and replication of public charter schools. At its fiscal year 2022 funding level of $440 million, the CSP amounts to less than 1% of federal spending on K-12 education but has a significant impact on the communities that…