One of the controversies surrounding charter schools is whether these schools may either "cream skim" high-performing students from traditional public schools or "pushout" low-achieving students or students with discipline histories, leaving traditional public schools to educate the most challenging students. In this study, we…

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…

Studies of charter closure rates typically focus on year-to-year closures. While important for researchers, such studies provide little guidance to families seeking to understand the risk of enrolling their child in a charter school. That is because studies determining how many schools close each year provide no information on how long the school…

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way that families and policymakers view K-12 education. Learning loss is having an outsized impact on students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic. And families are increasingly looking for new educational options for their children. For decades, access to educational options…

Despite the myriad of challenges that families, students, teachers and policymakers faced in 2021, the momentum to transform education did not waver. New opportunities for students unfolded in more than a dozen states through expanded private and public school choice. An additional 1.7 million students gained eligibility for private choice alone,…

The portfolio management models (PMM) has emerged as an important idea in educational governance over the last decade. In PMM systems, a district or other form of authorizer oversees a collection of independent organizations that operate schools according to their particular philosophy and strategic orientation. Yet underlying the design of PMMs…

To innovate for the future and improve equity, while also protecting foundational and proven principles that support high-quality education, ExcelinEd is committing to 5 goals over 5 years to impact 5 million students. Those goals hold the key to impactful and far-reaching changes in education, with the power to transform schools, students' lives,…

Focused on educational quality, innovation and opportunity--both within and outside of the traditional system--ExcelinEd advances a broad range of student-centered policy solutions that are successfully: (1) increasing student learning; (2) Readying graduates for college and career; and (3) Advancing equity. This year's annual report highlights…

In "Redefining the School District in America," Nelson Smith reexamines existing recovery school districts (RSDs)--entities in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan charged with running and turning around their state's worst schools--and assembles the most comprehensive catalog of similar initiatives underway and under consideration…

Once considered a way to help integrate racially divided districts, magnet schools today have been forced to evolve, given increasing pressure to provide more public school choices and legal barriers against using race to determine school enrollment. In a post-desegregation era, many large districts like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore County…

The traditional delivery system for public K-12 education in the U.S. is being disrupted by forces from without (e.g., forms of competition, including charter schools) and from within (e.g., new regulatory requirements, including meaningful teacher evaluation and the Common Core). As in any sizable sector of the economy, challenges to the status…

The "Tennessee K-12 & School Choice Survey" project, commissioned by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and conducted by Braun Research Inc. (BRI), measures Tennessee registered voters' familiarity and views on a range of K-12 education topics and school choice reforms. The author and his colleagues report response levels…

For all the national and even international debate about the state of American education, public schooling in the U.S. is still a local matter--and the school district remains its hub. As administrators know, there's nothing abstract about the process of getting millions of students into their seats, assuring they receive the instruction they're…

As the challenges of education governance loom ever larger and the dysfunction and incapacity of the traditional K-12 system reveal themselves as major roadblocks to urgently needed reforms across that system, many have asked, "What's the alternative?" Part of the answer is the Recovery School District, a new state-created entity that…

President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been championing charter schools for months, creating what some advocates believe is the most forceful national momentum to expand the largely independent public schools since the first charter opened nearly 20 years ago. That high-profile advocacy is being matched, moreover,…