2022 turned out to be a dynamic year for charter schools, as many state lawmakers recognized the fact parents want more schooling options that fit their children's unique needs. In total, close to 50% of states with charter school laws gained at least one legislative win. Read for more details on how the charter school movement strengthened in the…

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…

Finding funds to build and renovate facilities is a major hurdle for public charter schools because most state laws do not provide charter schools with the full amount of state and local funding that other public schools receive. Although an increasing number of states are passing laws to address charter school facility funding gaps, inequities…

This article takes advantage of a recently released national data set on school site expenditures to evaluate spending variations between traditional district operated schools and charter schools operated by for-profit versus nonprofit management firms. Prior research has revealed the revenue-enhancement, private fund-raising capacity of major…

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,…

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…

Public education funding relies on revenues from a variety of sources, from local taxpayers to federal programs targeting students with specific needs. The vast sum of funding collected--in excess of $600 billion annually--often masks which entities fund the education of our nation's youth. Questions of funding adequacy and equity across school…

Accessing affordable facilities has long been identified as one of the most significant challenges facing charter schools. In response to this challenge, an array of policy and market-based approaches has emerged over the years. Examples of these approaches include: public and private credit enhancement, tax-exempt bond financing, community…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

Charter schools are deregulated institutions that are provided considerable autonomy in order to spur innovation, yet little is known about their governance practices. The studies of charter school governance that do exist, however, typically concern cases of charter school failure. The causes of charter school failure are often clear and…

A total of 33 sites, including states, school districts, charter school coalitions, and other education organizations make up Cohorts 1 and 2 of the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). These sites received funds beginning in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007 to redesign compensation programs for teachers and principals. The U.S. Department of…

Online learning has steadily become a more integral strategy for schools and districts in their efforts to offer students greater access to the courses they need. Where in the past, much of the online learning activity happened at the state level or regional level, more and more schools are exercising greater control over their online and digital…

This Evidence Based Education (EBE) request asks for information relating to funding for virtual schools. The EBE Request Desk was asked to provide a scan of states for information on how they fund virtual schools and what the current funding levels are (most current year for which such data is available). This paper provides answers to this…

The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), an organization dedicated to redesigning and expanding school time to improve opportunities and outcomes for high poverty students, and the Education Commission of the States (ECS), with a mission to foster both the exchange of ideas on education issues among the states and long range strategic…

Online charter schools are one key subset of the K-12 online education landscape, which also includes state virtual schools, district-level online programs, private providers of both individual courses and entire schools, and others. As of late 2010, online and blended charter schools existed in more than 20 states, serving more than 100,000…