Publications

For the past 20 years, the public charter school movement has been a leader in innovation and education reform.

Traditional public school districts hold a monopoly over the financing and ownership of public education facilities. With rare exceptions, public charter schools have no legal claim to these buildings. This monopoly is an accident of history.

The public charter school movement has evolved for two decades, yet the challenge of securing affordable facilities continues to confront nearly every charter school.

In 2005, the Task Force on Charter School Quality and Accountability issued, Renewing the Compact, a position statement for the charter school sector that presented recommendations for achieving the goals of growth and quality.

In this Details from the Dashboard report, we examine race/ethnicity breakouts for public charter schools and traditional public schools at the state and the school district level.

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.

The interactive data tool (preview below) allows users to control the type of information presented in graphical form.

In only twenty years, the charter sector has grown from a single charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota to approximately 5,600 public charter schools serving more than 2 million students in nearly every state in the nation.

2011 has been a significant year for charter school policy across the country. At long last, Maine enacted a charter school law, becoming the 42nd jurisdiction that allows this innovative public school option. Ten states lifted their caps on charter school growth (either partially or entirely).

As the public charter schools movement approaches the 20 year anniversary of the opening of the first charter school, the sector continues to grow. Over 500 new public charter schools opened their doors for the 2011-12 school year.

Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) and Education Management Organizations (EMOs) play an important part in the scalability of the charter school movement by enabling the replication of models that work, creating economies of scale, encouraging collaboration between similar schools, and build