Today, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released The Health of the Charter Public School Movement: A State-by-State Analysis, which evaluates the health of the charter public school movement in key states across the country. Following the first report released in October 2014, this second edition measures movement growth, innovation and quality, while this year doubling the number of quality measures. Due to these quality additions, a total of 18 states with charter school laws met the criteria for inclusion in this year’s report.
The purpose of this report is to evaluate the health of each state’s charter public school movement, as a companion to our annual evaluation of the strength of each state’s charter public school law. One potentially helpful way to understand the difference between the two reports is to think of one as focused on inputs (law rankings) and the other as focused on outputs (health-of-the-movement rankings). Most of the states with higher-ranked charter school laws are also highly ranked in the health-of-the-movement rankings.
Through these two reports, we hope to shine a light on those states that are creating supportive policy environments as well as those states that are creating healthy movements. We also aim to provide information via these reports on where states can strengthen both their laws and their implementation of those laws moving forward. In this report, we provide data about the health of the charter public school movement along 13 indicators of growth, innovation, and quality.
The report finds that states with higher rankings are strong in many of the following areas: they have a large percentage of students in charter schools, strong rates of new schools opening and serve a significant amount of historically underserved students. They also measure high on innovation—meaning they have a diverse array of school models, and on quality—meaning their charter schools are showing strong academic gains.