Schools utilize a range of consequences to maintain order and safety. Some employ zero-tolerance policies accompanied by exclusionary tactics like suspension (Martinez, 2009; Muschert et al., 2014). Suspensions are criticized for their disproportionate assignment to students who are Black, male, assigned an IEP, and receiving lunch assistance…

Separate school placements persist for students with extensive support needs (ESN) despite longstanding federal mandates for all students with disabilities to be educated in the least restrictive environment. This study extends research on separate school placement for students with ESN to explore the potential impact of locale and charter school…

This multiple-bounded case study explored charter-school music teacher practitioners' (MTPs') and instructional leaders' (ILs') perceptions of professional development (PD) in four charter management organizations (CMOs). The purpose was to provide a rich description of these practitioners' professional development, with the goal of spurring…

Advocates often predict that school choice policies will expand access to high-quality schools, particularly for marginalized communities. To interrogate this assumption, we employed a sequential mixed-methods analysis examining the state of charter reform in the District of Columbia. We observed that stakeholders consistently defined equity as…

Since the early 2000s, billionaires have treated the Denver Public School District as a Neo-liberal education experiment. Using a tangled web of astroturf groups, nonprofits, and training organizations, billionaires have hijacked this public school district, leaving some schools, students, and democracy behind. In this report, Denver's Mike…

Cyber charter schools may increase access to a range of educational offerings, but they substantially underperform traditional public schools on measured academic performance, as demonstrated in a range of studies with distinct samples and methods. Artificial testing conditions offer a possible explanation. In contrast to face-to-face students,…

We estimate the longitudinal effects of charter schools authorized by different authorizing bodies on student achievement by using student-level data from Indiana. The results of our analysis point to substantial variation, especially between the state's two largest authorizers: Ball State University and the Indianapolis Mayor's Office. Some of…

This study used an explanatory mixed methods research design to examine the scaffolding strategies of middle school teachers during a design problem-based learning (PBL) unit. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques were used in data collection and analysis, and the findings were integrated for interpretation. Our analysis of classroom…

Charter schools were originally intended to improve the American public education system by introducing innovative practices that could be replicated elsewhere. Charter critics and proponents alike, however, question the degree to which charter schools are truly innovative. While alarm has been raised about apparent conformity among charter…

This convergent parallel mixed method study was designed to identify obstacles that prevent historically underrepresented racial and ethnic student groups from taking online classes at Phi Beta County Community College and to determine what aid students perceive as necessary to remove these obstacles. This study included three Calloway Charter…

Most studies of No-Excuses charter schools are distributive in nature. They answer a question of distributive justice: do these schools adequately close the academic achievement gap that exists in America between white and Black or Hispanic students? When discussion of No-Excuses schools is limited to their distributive worth, critics of…

The tendency of charter schools to increase school segregation has been well established, but less is known about what school administrators perceive as the mechanisms causing segregation among charters and traditional public schools. Using the results of exploratory surveys of North Carolina charter school directors and district superintendents,…

Successive governments, in embracing a neoliberalist ideology of decentralization and privatization, have radically reformed the nature of community-based, comprehensive state education. The transition from 'government to governance' (Rhodes, 1997) combined with the ideology of academization (DfE, 2010a) has created a democratic deficit1 (Corbett,…

Beginning in the fall of 2017, forty-one districts and charter schools entered into three-year legal agreements with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights to reduce the racial disproportionality in their district or school's exclusionary discipline practices, specifically the overrepresentation of students of color in suspensions and…

In this critical autoethnography, I reflect on my experience teaching in a KIPP charter school in an urban, racially diverse city in the southwestern U.S. Over the past few decades KIPP has gained both prestige and resentment as a major character in the charter school movement. Their focus on supporting students from underrepresented racial…