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Charter schools in New Orleans (NOLA) now serve over four out of five students in the city - the largest market share of any big city in the nation. As of the 2011-12 school year, most of the city's schools (around 80 percent), charter and regular public, are overseen by the Recovery School District (RSD), a statewide agency created in 2003 to take over low-performing schools, which assumed control of most NOLA schools in Katrina's aftermath. Around three-quarters of these RSD schools (50 out of 66) are charters. The remainder of NOLA's schools are overseen either by the Orleans Parish School Board (which is responsible for 11 charters and six regular public schools, and taxing authority for all parish schools) or by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (which is directly responsible for three charters, and also supervises the RSD). New Orleans is often held up as a model for the rapid expansion of charter schools in other urban districts, based on the argument that charter proliferation since 2005-06 has generated rapid improvements in student outcomes.

We examine the effects of charter schools on reading and mathematics achievement for students who attend charter schools in the School District of Philadelphia. The report also examines several other important questions about charter schools, including: What are the effects of years of operation, grades served, mission, and demographics of charter schools on student achievement?  What types of students do charter schools attract?  Do charter schools have higher student turnover rates than traditional public schools?  Does the existence of charter schools have an impact on student achievement in traditional public schools?

I utilize longitudinal data covering all public school students in Florida to study the performance of charter schools and their competitive impact on traditional public schools. Controlling for student-level fixed effects, I find achievement initially is lower in charters. However, by their fifth year of operation new charter schools reach a par with the average traditional public school in math and produce higher reading achievement scores than their traditional public school counterparts. Among charters, those targeting at-risk and special education students demonstrate lower student achievement, while charter schools managed by for-profit entities perform no differently on average than charters run by nonprofits. Controlling for preexisting traditional public school quality, competition from charter schools is associated with modest increases in math scores and unchanged reading scores in nearby traditional public schools

Anyone who wants to start a charter school must of course receive permission, and there are laws and policies governing how such permission is granted. In some states, multiple entities (mostly districts) serve as charter authorizers, whereas in others, there is only one or very few. For example, in California there are almost 300 entities that can authorize schools, almost all of them school districts. In contrast, in Arizona, a state board makes all the decisions. The conventional wisdom among many charter advocates is that the performance of charter schools depends a great deal on the "quality" of authorization policies - how those who grant (or don't renew) charters make their decisions. This is often the response when supporters are confronted with the fact that charter results are varied but tend to be, on average, no better or worse than those of regular public schools. They argue that some authorization policies are better than others, i.e., bad processes allow some poorly-designed schools start, while failing to close others. This argument makes sense on the surface, but there seems to be scant evidence on whether and how authorization policies influence charter performance. From that perspective, the authorizer argument might seem a bit like tautology - i.e., there are bad schools because authorizers allow bad schools to open, and fail to close them. As I am not particularly well-versed in this area, I thought I would look into this a little bit.

I'm a more than a little late to the punch on GAO's recent report on special education and charter schools, but I wanted to comment briefly because I continue to be totally flummoxed by some folks in the charter community's reaction to what was, essentially, a very even handed reporting of data on special education enrollment in charter schools. As my colleague Andy Rotherham noted last week, this report was hardly the "slam" on charter schools that some folks are characterizing it as, and the GAO went out of its way to describe the number of factors that might contribute to lowered rates of special education enrollment in some charter schools, even if no one is doing anything wrong. I'm particularly troubled, though, by an argument I've seen some folks in the charter movement take up lately that it's somehow unfair or unreasonable to compare charter special education enrollments to district special ed enrollments because, while school districts or systems are required to serve all students, individual public schools are not required to serve every child with special needs. This argument is problematic for a host of reasons

A recent lengthy post from the Shanker Blog by Matt DiCarlo got my attention just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday entitled "The Uncertain Future of Charter School Proliferation." The post, and the blog as a whole, are no fan of charter schools, and casts doubt on charters in general on a national scale. Two areas of charter success in the country, the post acknowledges are Boston and New York City, as certain studies show. One factor, Mr. DiCarlo suggests, is that the "market share" of charter schools in these cities is small, so they they can "get a larger share" of "finite sources," presumably private funding. Count me skeptical on that one. Mr. DiCarlo also acknowledges more credibly that successful charter schools devote much greater time teaching and tutoring than district schools, which contribute to the higher charter results in Boston and New York City.

Whether charter schools will increase segregation in schools and, ultimately, in society is an important and hotly contested question. Charter proponents point to the high enrollments of minority and economically disadvantaged pupils in charter schools, compare them with overall state enrollment percentages, and contend that charter schools are integrative. Opponents explain these enrollment levels by noting the high minority and poverty concentrations in the urban areas where charter schools are centered. They quote other research suggesting that the schools exacerbate existing segregation. Gary Miron, Jessica Urschel, William Mathis, and Elana Tornquist examine this issue using a national data base of schools operated by Education Management Organizations (EMOs), 95% of which are charter schools. The study explores whether these EMO-operated charter schools integrate or segregate students by four key demographic characteristics: ethnic/minority classification, socioeconomic status, disabling condition and English language facility.

Charter critics often contend that many charters have high attrition, and that lower-performing students leave - whether due to "counseling out" (as may have been the case in the NYT story) or on their own volition - which artificially boosts test scores. The standard reply to this argument from charter supporters is to point to studies (such as this paper on New York City charters and this one on KIPP schools) showing that charter school attrition is similar to that of regular public schools. In addition, supporters point out that these studies that include high-performing charters, though limited in scope and number, use techniques to ensure that attrition does not directly affect their results (for example, put simply, "following" students who leave charters into their new schools).

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

In this report I discuss why it is so important that authorizers close failing charters, review the facts about charter and authorizer performance, examine why some authorizers fail to close underperforming charters, and propose solutions to these problems. To answer such questions, I have reviewed the literature and interviewed fifteen current or former charter authorizers and another ten experts on charter schools. In addition, thanks to the generosity of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), I have reviewed the data accumulated by its annual surveys of authorizers.

Just at a time when the future of charter schools in Louisiana looks brightest, more and more charter school operations are self-destructing. A few months ago, numerous violations of child protection laws and alleged cheating and other improprieties caused the cancellation of the charter for Abramson Science and Technology Charter in New Orleans. A State Department investigation continues of its sister charter, Kennilworth Science and Technology in Baton Rouge. Now we learn (click for the Advocate story) that all 5 schools managed by the Advance Baton Rouge charter management organization will gradually be taken over or turned over to other managers by the State Recovery District. (There is apparently no consideration of returning these schools to their former parish school boards)

Are charter schools public? Are they private? Are they somewhere in between? There is a lively debate in the education community over these questions. Charter advocates claim that charter schools are, of course, public schools, with all the democratic accountability that this entails. The only difference, they say, is that charters are public schools with the freedom and space to innovate. On the other side, charter critics argue that contracting with the government to receive taxpayer money does not make an organization public (after all, no one would say Haliburton is public) and if a school is not regulated and governed by any elected or appointed bodies answerable to the public, then it is not a public school. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was recently forced to weigh in on this question. It came out with a clear verdict that charter schools are not, in fact, public schools.

Do charter schools do more - get better results - with less? If you ask this question, you'll probably get very strong answers, ranging from the affirmative to the negative, often depending on the person's overall view of charter schools. The reality, however, is that we really don't know. Actually, despite uninformed coverage of insufficient evidence, researchers don't even have a good handle on how much charter schools spend, to say nothing of whether how and how much they spend leads to better outcomes. Reporting of charter financial data is incomplete, imprecise and inconsistent. It is difficult to disentangle the financial relationships between charter management organizations (CMOs) and the schools they run, as well as that between charter schools and their "host" districts.

This book aims to inform the policy debate by examining four primary research questions in several geographic locations: (1) What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? (2) What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between TPSs and charter schools? (3) What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and of entering college? (4) What effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs? We  examine similarities and diferences in the answers to these questions across locations, seeking insights about the policy levers that might be available to improve the outcomes associated with charter schools.

The public charter school movement has grown rapidly in the 20 years since the first public charter school opened in 1992, with over 5,600 schools now serving more than two million students. One of the most exceptional developments within the first two decades of the movement has been the rise of high performing public charter schools with missions intently focused on educating students from traditionally underserved communities. Given that the demographics of these communities are often homogenous, it is no surprise the demographics of these schools are that way as well. In fact, the student populations at these public charter schools usually mirror the populations in nearby district schools. While much media attention rightly has been given to these schools, the past decade or so also has seen a noteworthy rise in high performing public charter schools with missions intentionally designed to serve racially and economically integrated student populations. These schools are utilizing their autonomy to achieve a diverse student population through location-based strategies, recruitment efforts and enrollment processes. Perhaps most notably, a growing number of cities-and the parents and educators in them-are welcoming both types of public charter school models for their respective (and in some cases unprecedented) contributions to raising student achievement, particularly for students who have previously struggled in school. This brief showcases this development in three of these cities: Denver, Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

I bet you never thought you would see the words collective bargaining and charter schools in the same headline, but a new study came out this week from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) located at the University of Washington. The study is titled, "Are Charter School Unions Worth the Bargain?" Mitch Price, legal analyst for CRPE, is the author with a forward from Robin J. Lake. It is worth the read. The study looked at collective bargaining agreements from 10 charter schools. Yes, there is collective bargaining at some charter schools. The study indicated that as of 2009-10, 604 of the 4,315 charter schools have collective bargaining. That is about 12% of all charter schools. The National Education Association represents 76% of those schools, and the American Federation of Teachers represents 11%. The remaining 13% are shared through merger of the two unions.

In some cases, charter schools are managed by for-profit entities (referred to in this article as "management companies"). The management agreements documenting these relationships range from agreements to provide general administrative support to agreements to provide virtually every service to be offered by the charter school, including curriculum, payroll, compliance reporting, providing teachers and staff through employee leasing, and the purchase and leasing of facilities. Many charter schools are intended to be operated as 501(c)(3) public charities. Historically, the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") has carefully reviewed other types of charitable organizations operated by management companies to determine whether they qualify as a tax-exempt charities because they are, in fact, operating for the private benefit of the for-profit management company. However, the IRS has not brought a similar focus on this issue to charter schools generally - until now. The IRS is poised to increase its scrutiny of charter school/management company relationships and is now subjecting charter schools to more stringent standards defining such relationships.

"While small schools and theme academies have faded as a focus of reform initiatives, charters have expanded rapidly. They raise similar issues and many more. In fact, given the growing promotion of charters by federal and state policymakers as a strategy to "reform" public education, the stakes are much higher. According to Education Week, there are now more than 6,000 publicly funded charter schools in the United States enrolling about 4 percent of all students. Since 2008, the number of charter schools has grown by almost 50 percent, while over that same period nearly 4,000 traditional public schools have closed.[i] This represents a huge transfer of resources and students from our public education system to the publicly funded, but privately managed charter sector. These trends raise concerns about the future of public education and its promise of quality education for all."

I recently wrote about an analysis of Michigan's education system that concluded that charter schools-contrary to what some of their backers claim-spend more on administrative costs, and less on instruction, than traditional public schools. But you didn't really think that would be the final word on the subject, did you? This week, a consultant writing for a charter school association takes issue with that claim, put forward in a study released by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. In a blog post written for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Larry Maloney argues that the authors' research does not present a true comparison of administrative spending in charters and traditional publics, particularly in urban areas, such as charter school-rich Detroit.

In several previous posts I have addressed the common argument among charter advocacy organizations (notably, not necessarily those out there doing the hard work of actually running a real charter school - but the pundits who claim to speak on their behalf) that charter schools do more, with less while serving comparable student populations. This argument appears to be a central theme of current policy proposals in Connecticut, which, among other things, would substantially increase funding for urban charter schools while doing little to provide additional support for high need traditional public school districts. For more on that point, see here. I've posted some specific information on Connecticut charter schools in previous posts, but have not addressed them more broadly. Here, I provide a run-down of simple descriptive data, widely available through two major credible sources.