A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

About This Report

The National Study of Charter Schools (the Study) is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education as authorized by the 1994 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Study is a 4-year research program to document and analyze the charter school movement.

The Study's Focus

The Study addresses three major research questions:

• How have charter schools been implemented?

• Under what conditions, if any, have they improved student achievement?

• What impact have they had on public education?

• What models of education have charter schools developed that can be used by other public schools?

• What lessons can be learned from the charter school experience for public education, and what implications should be drawn for state and national policy?

• How might charter schools evolve in the coming decade?

The Study's Research Approach

The Study's research consists of (1) annual phone surveys of all charter schools; (2) repeated field visits to a sample of charter schools and their surrounding districts; (3) the administration of student achievement tests over time at a sample of charter schools; (4) the administration of teacher surveys to teachers in all field visit sites; (5) analyses across states of charter laws, state agency rulings and procedures, court rulings, and education policies; and (6) an examination of how charter school legislation and the existence of charter schools have affected school districts. This Report, the fourth annual report from the Study, presents findings that focus on describing how charter schools are being implemented. Other Study reports address the remaining questions listed above. This Report in particular provides concise summaries of data that describe selected characteristics of charter schools in comparison, wherever possible, to other public schools.

Section A begins with an overview of the charter movement. It describes the growth of charter schools, paying particular attention to the differences across the charter states in terms of the number of charter schools and when they became operational. Since charter school legislation is unique to each state, we summarize key characteristics of the charter laws by state.

Section B summarizes basic characteristics of charter schools compared to other public schools. School characteristics included in this section are school size, grade level configuration, student to teacher ratio, and student to computer ratio.

Section C focuses on student demographic features of charter schools compared to other public schools. This section briefly describes the racial/ethnic composition of the schools, and the percentages of students that are low income, have disabilities, or have limited proficiency in English.

Section D reviews data on several issues that are central to understanding how charter schools may operate differently from other public schools. These issues include the reasons why charter schools were started, challenges they have encountered during implementation, the autonomy they have for making critical decisions, and the ways in which they may be held accountable.

The Report's Data

The findings presented in this Report rely on four waves of telephone surveys to all cooperating charter schools that were open between the 1995-96 and 1998-99 school years, visits to 91 field sites across the country, and extensive analysis of state charter laws.

In the first year of a school's involvement in the study, a school administrator was asked to respond to a new charter school telephone survey. In each subsequent year, the school administrator was asked to respond to a follow-up telephone survey. For the first wave of data collection (Spring 1996), 252 charter schools had opened prior to or during the 1995-96 school year. These schools were asked to respond to the new school survey in 1996 and follow-up surveys in 1997, 1998, and 1999. For the second wave of data collection (Spring 1997), 178 additional charter schools had opened and were asked to respond to the new school survey in 1997 and the follow-up surveys in 1988 and 1999. For the third wave of data collection (Spring 1998), 284 additional charter schools had opened and were asked to respond to the new school survey in 1998 and the follow-up survey in 1999. For the fourth wave of data collection (Spring 1999), an additional 401 charter schools had opened and were asked to respond to the new school survey in 1999. Survey response rates ranged from 78 to 91 percent. The number of charter schools surveyed and the number that responded are included in the table below.

In general, this Report relies on the most recent information available but also draws from a range of years (1996-99). Unless otherwise noted, all charter school data presented in this report is drawn from the annual telephone survey data. Where possible, 1999 data are used. If we did not have data from a 1999 survey, the information is taken from previous surveys, the most recent of the 1998, 1997, or 1996 surveys. For a small number of questions, we asked for information only on selected surveys. In some cases, we only asked a question on the initial survey and not the follow-up survey. In those cases, we report the responses for all operating charter schools at the time of their first survey. In other cases, we only asked the question on a follow-up survey. When we report on data gathered only on a selected survey, we refer to a selected sample of schools. Responses for questions asked only on the 1998 and 1999 follow-up survey represent 87 percent of available charter schools (534 schools of a possible 614 responded).

It should be noted that for tables in the Report that present data by state, we have omitted states where three or fewer charter schools responded to the survey in order to protect school confidentiality. We make an exception to this rule in reporting school enrollment data and in reporting data on the charter creation status. In addition, state-level data from states that have fewer than 10 charter schools may not be meaningful and should be interpreted with caution. It is also the case that some individual school data may be incomplete if specific survey items were not answered. All figures and tables report the total number of responses on which the findings are based.

For some tables in the Report, data other than the telephone survey were gathered. To estimate charter school enrollment, we supplemented our telephone survey data with information from other sources. We drew on state sources in California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to include 1998-99 enrollment data for 36 missing schools in those states. The number of charter schools represented by these data is 1,011, which is 94 percent of our estimate of the 1,078 charter schools in operation during 1998-99. Enrollment for schools with multiple branches was summed across all branches.

Some tables in this Report provide comparison information about all public schools in the 27 states with operating charter schools. (For the purposes of the remainder of this Report, we refer to the District of Columbia as a "state.") Public school data come from the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data Survey 1997-98. These data refer to all public schools (including charter schools) in the 27 charter states. For public school information on racial demographics, 1,177 schools or 2.1 percent of all 56,640 public schools reported racial information that was considered invalid because it did not match the total enrollment information. An additional 714 public schools did not report ethnicity data. The ethnicity tables are therefore calculated on the basis of 54,749 public schools. In all cases, we drew on the best comparative data available.

Number of Charter Schools in the National Telephone Survey

³ This number includes 23 schools that were closed as of the 1998-1999 school year; 12 from the first wave of data collection (schools opened prior to the 1995-96 school year), 6 from the second wave of data collection (schools opened as of the 1996-97 school year), and 5 from the third wave of data collection (schools opened as of the 1997-98 school year). The 59 charter schools that have closed among all charter schools include schools that closed before the Study began, schools that did not respond to the telephone survey, and schools that closed in their first year before the Study was able to survey them. For the 1999 survey, an additional 60 schools were surveyed that had not responded to previous new school surveys.

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Executive Summary

A. States and Charter Schools