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saying that charter schools are vital to promoting innovation in American schools (Obama, 2009)

With so much variation among charter schools, however, significant questions exist regarding how well they are educating students, how they manage their financial responsibilities, and whether creating more charter schools will be better for the nation's schoolchildren.

In 2009, Secretary Duncan made lifting charter caps a key component of qualifying for education funding under the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) program. Originally, to qualify for RTTT money, Duncan said states must eliminate any caps on charter schools. In November 2009, Duncan changed the requirement so that states with caps could still receive money if they had other kinds of innovative public schools and as long as the caps were generous enough (The Wall Street Journal, 2009).

Parents' demand for charter schools is outpacing their availability in many locations, with an estimated 365,000 students on waitlists—enough to fill more than 1,100 average-sized charter schools

In Montana, where there are no charter schools and where more than half of the state's school districts have enrollments of fewer than 100 students, Superintendent of Schools Denise Juneau objected to the RTTT focus on charter schools in a July 28 letter to Secretary Duncan. "Montana's rural context and economic status has made it challenging for many communities and the state to support the public schools we currently have," Juneau wrote in the letter, "much less encourage the duplication of infrastructure a charter school would mean in most communities" (McNeil, 2009).

"The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist," he said, in reference to a recent study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University that found that more than 80 percent of charter schools were performing the same as or worse than their local public schools (2009).

The comparison found that only 17 percent of charter schools were producing gains that were significantly better than their traditional public school counterparts, while 46 percent were similar to their local public schools and 37 percent performed significantly worse (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2009).

In contrast, another recent study by Stanford economics professor Caroline Hoxby found that students who entered lotteries and gained admission to New York City charter schools performed better on state assessments than students who entered the same lotteries and were not admitted to the charter schools.

The findings of both studies have been disputed. Critics of the Hoxby study point out that it relies on extrapolations of data, comparing statistical projections of student achievement as opposed to actual student achievement (Ravitch, 2009). Critics of the CREDO study raise doubts about its seemingly contradictory findings that charter schools provided gains for English language learners and poor students while having negative effects on Hispanic and black students (Anderson, 2009).

For middle and high school charters that did have baseline scores, that study found charter schools in five of the seven locations it examined were on average no better or worse than local traditional public schools (Zimmer et al., 2009).

Of the more than 5,250 charter schools that have ever opened, 657 have closed since 1992. Of those, 41 percent closed because of financial deficiencies caused by either low enrollment or inequitable funding; 27 percent for mismanagement; and only 14 percent for poor academic performance (Allen et al., 2009).

A 2005 analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) found that 90 percent of authorizers were local school districts, and two-thirds lacked a dedicated office or staff to oversee the authorizing process (Vanourek, 2005). NAPCS, which has described quality authorizing as an intensive, data-driven process that requires dedicating substantial resources to the task, has called for stricter accountability for local school boards and other entities that authorize charter schools