On February 24, 2009, President Obama outlined his fiscal plan for the 2010 budget to a joint session of Congress. Stressing the importance of backing education, Obama vowed to "expand our commitment to charter schools" and "invest in innovation." Obama's plan for more effective charters includes increasing federal aid and urging states with charter school caps to lift them--and tougher action to close charters that fall short. As this education sector continues to grow, with more than 4500 charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia, state data systems need to improve and become more transparent. To maximize the benefits of this new federal support, states must increase accountability for all public schools. Currently, in California there's too much data collection and not enough data use. Missing data is the primary problem. California offers no incentives for submitting timely reports, has no check on data completeness, and no penalties for failing to file. California charters can't submit their data directly to Sacramento, only to their districts. As choices in public education increase, so increases the need to provide as much information as possible to policymakers, educators and parents, so they can make informed decisions about school performance. CSI-USC 2009 expands what is known about the performance of California charter schools and, at the same time, throws a challenge to schools, districts and the state to confront the problem of missing and inaccurate data. Appendices include: (1) Data Sources and Terms; (2) Creating CSI-USC ; and (3) Index and Data Sources.