As the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across the country in 2020, Washington state's emergent charter sector was growing. During this time, charter enrollment was growing by 28% each year, on average, and the number of schools in operation doubled from eight to 16. The new schools that opened were planned long before the pandemic. But even…

Opponents of education choice often make two arguments about its effect on rural areas: (1) education choice will not help in rural areas because there are few or no alternatives to the district school system; and (2) education choice will destroy the district school system because so many students will leave for alternative options. These two…

America has a long history of small-school environments, such as one-room schoolhouses and homeschools. But in recent years, other models have developed, giving students more intimate settings for learning and enabling their families to play a larger role in their schooling. Microschools are a leading example of this growing sector that also…

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…

In the United States, long-standing school choice policies and practices in Arizona have developed into a market-based system of schooling for many residents in the state, especially in the larger cities. In this study, I analyze qualitative data gathered from school leaders and parents in one Arizona district public school who discussed marketing…

This quantitative correlation study attempted to determine what relationships exited between the disproportionate enrollment of students with disabilities, the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) assessment scores, and exclusionary enrollment practices towards students with disabilities in Arizona Charter Schools. The problem was the…

Many policy analysts favor holding deficient public schools accountable: Either they should improve or else close. Hypotheses are developed which explore how school type (district, charter) and enrollment size influence these two accountability outcomes for deficient Arizona elementary campuses operating under two educational oversight regimes: No…

During this decade, American education will shift from print to digital, from flat and sequential content to engaging and adaptive, and from batch processing to personalized learning. There will also be a slow enrollment shift from traditional district-operated schools to schools and programs operated by organizations authorized under contracts or…

Most discussions of charter schools assume that they are monolithic. While the media, researchers, and policymakers are obsessed with comparing charters to traditional public schools, there's been little interest in comparing different types of charter schools to one another--until now. This study--the first of its kind--categorizes the nation's…

The National Association of State Directors of Special Education has published documents on home schooling and various aspects of the charter school movement, but not on other types of school choice such as vouchers. This Project Forum document focuses on voucher programs that are specifically designed to provide public funds for parental…

Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school…

This report contains the typology of charter schools that were sought, based on Carpenter's careful sorting of 1,182 charter schools, representing 87 percent of all those operating in 2001-2002 in the five states (Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, and Texas) that then accounted for the lion's share of U.S. charter schools. Carpenter sorted…

In 2004 the Arizona Education Policy Initiative (AEPI), a collaboration of Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona, conducted its first-annual survey of parents in a systematic effort to capture parent opinion and establish a framework for tracking parent views over time. Assessing parent opinion is…

The Arizona Education Policy Initiative (AEPI), a collaboration of Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona, conducted a statewide telephone survey to get parents' perspectives on the condition of education in the state. From March 17 to March 27, 2004, a statewide random sample of 400 Arizona parents…