Preparing students to be successful in their high school begins with their freshmen orientation program. Incoming Charter School of Wilmington (CSW) freshmen struggle to adjust to the demands of the curricula, learn the various technologies, establish new social relationships and navigate around their new school building. The CSW Freshmen…

The National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools (the Center) is deeply committed to ensuring that students with disabilities have equal access to charter schools and that charter schools are designed and operated to enable success for all students. To accomplish this goal, the Center conducts analyses and releases a comprehensive…

Policy debates about charter schools are often dominated by polarizing emotional narratives. However scholarly attention on narratives in education policy, and especially narratives about charter schools in local contexts, has been limited. The recently developed Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) approach offers guidelines to systematically study…

Imagine Schools is a national family of 51 nonprofit public charter school campuses located in seven states and the District of Columbia. The schools serves approximately 29,000 students in K-12 classrooms. In the past few years, Imagine Schools began a move toward adopting a restorative mindset that emphasizes positive relationships and the…

While project-based learning can be traced back to centuries-old theory, new research shows how it is linked to a variety of efforts for change in innovative schools.

Using nationally representative parent surveys over a 10-year period, this article asks if there were differences in parent engagement and satisfaction at public charter and district schools. It then examines whether any such differences persisted when accounting for observable school and family characteristics, including whether parents conducted…

This Data Point compares the sources of information in evaluating teacher performance and how the information is used by traditional public school and public charter school principals in the United States. It uses data from the public school principal questionnaire from the 2017-18 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), a nationally…

A school facility's quality and accessibility have important impacts on schools' functionality to serve as places of high-quality education. While these challenges are familiar to most schools in the United States, charter schools are responsible for acquiring and paying for their educational facilities, a responsibility that local school…

This "Equity by Design Research Brief" presents a qualitative study of Black and Latinx parents of students with disabilities who experienced conflicts with charter schools. The purpose of the study was to understand the mechanism that generated and sustained the conflict. Understanding this conflict can provide guidance for charter…

The Kauffman School is a public, tuition-free charter school serving Kansas City students. In the 2018-19 school year, the school enrolled 1,127 students in grades 5 through 12. Most (89 percent) of the students were low income, and 89 percent were Black or Hispanic. This report evaluates the impact of the Kauffman School on student college…

In 1995, Texas created its first charter schools, which consisted of open enrollment schools of choice, as part of education initiative/reform. However, low graduation rates among public schools in the state persisted. The purpose of this study was to explore factors that might contribute to students who received vouchers to attend private or…

The purpose of this qualitative, narrative-inquiry research study was to examine the perceptions and implementation of the Response to Intervention (RTI) process among elementary teachers who taught at a charter school in the southern area of Dallas, TX. In the qualitative research study, educators were provided an opportunity to voice their…

Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for Public Education (USGRC) is a New Orleans-based coalition melding research and grassroots organizing for racial-economic equity. Buras examines her involvement as a scholar activist working in solidarity with community groups to document the effects of the charter school takeover on black public…

Critical consciousness refers to the ability to analyze and take action against oppressive social forces shaping society. This longitudinal, mixed methods study compared the critical consciousness development of adolescents of color (n = 453) attending two sets of high schools featuring schooling models that represent "opposing"…

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…