Although charter schools are frequently afforded flexibility from many state laws that govern traditional public schools, a growing number of charter school teachers have now unionized and introduced collective bargaining to the charter sector. Using data from a detailed content analysis of teacher CBAs from California, we compare the…

For decades, charter schools have been promoted as a panacea for increasing competition in the educational marketplace. Supporters argue that increased choice forces neighboring schools to innovate, while opponents contend that charters "skim" students and funds away from traditional public schools (TPS). We test the two differing views…

The purpose of this study was to compare virtual school students' learning outcomes with traditional school students' learning outcomes in Texas. The research design was a quantitative study using a retrospective causal-comparative design. The researcher used archival state assessment data to compare the learning outcomes of K-12 virtual school…

Collected Biannually since 1968, the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) represents the U.S. Department of Education's most substantial effort to understand data related to students' educational opportunities throughout K-12 schooling, particularly for historically marginalized student populations. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department…

Parent-led, home-based education, or homeschooling, has grown rapidly over recent decades with participation rates increasing more than 100-fold to now nearly one in 25 students nationwide in the United States. However, the research base has not grown correspondingly, and homeschoolers remain understudied. We systematically surveyed a population…

Charter schools have been growing in the United States and worldwide over the past two decades, and there is considerable interest in how they affect students remaining in traditional public schools (TPSs). Charter schools present important policy questions, as they often compete for the same students, educators, and resources as TPSs. This brief…

We describe the levels, trends, and patterns of school closure and restructuring in the United States from 1991 to 2019 across all sectors using a near census of K-12 schools. Focusing on the years with the best available data, 2014-18, we find that the annual closure rate of charter, private, and traditional public schools (TPSs) were 5.1, 2.9,…

The share of students attending charter schools has been rising. There is evidence that charter school growth has increased socioeconomic segregation of students between schools. In this paper, we assess whether charter school growth affects how students are organized within nearby traditional public schools (TPS). We use administrative data from…

Using six waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey that span two decades, our study explores the differences between urban charter and traditional public school teachers and how those differences become more or less pronounced over time. During this time frame, the charter sector experienced…

This first of six briefs analyzing the latest available data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores enrollment of students with disabilities by school sector, state, grade level, and charter legal status--that is, operating as a local education agency (LEA) or as part of an LEA. The goal is to…

The purpose of this qualitative narrative study was to examine and understand the public high school traditional learning teachers' preparations for a transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic through their lived experiences, stories, and perceptions. The problem is that the pandemic presented significant challenges for public…

This second of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores enrollment of students with disabilities by race, gender, English proficiency, and primary disability to gain a fuller picture of educational equity. It is recognized that such categories can, at times, conceal as…

This fourth of six briefs analyzing data from the 2020-2021 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), released earlier this year, focuses on the experiences of students with disabilities with disciplinary practices at both charter schools and traditional public schools. Though the COVID-19 pandemic was still in its early stages, concerns about the…

This third of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores the educational settings where students with disabilities spend their time. As was the case in the analysis of the previous CRDC covering the 2018-19 school year, students with disabilities spend more time in…