Charter Schools and School Choice

Meeting the multitude of complex academic, administrative, and regulatory challenges facing public charter schools requires the right approach and the right team. What is the best way to address the academic needs of diverse learners? How do you create and make better use of performance data streams? Where is the balance between monitoring schools for public accountability and protecting autonomy to spur innovation?

Our Work

Young children raising hands at story timeWorking with charter schools, authorizers and policy makers, boards, and management companies, AIR conducts studies to identify, design, and implement systems that help organizations cultivate practices that result in high-quality schools and accountability. We place a wide range of expertise at the fingertips of the people leading charter school work. Our charter school and school improvement policy and practice veterans are versed in the most effective approaches and have first-hand experience serving as charter school teachers, administrators, governing board members, authorizers and researchers.

Comprehensive analysis, targeted expertise to close gaps, and proven data management and systems building are instrumental in improving performance across instructional, administrative, and school community functions. Technical assistance can be tailored for education agencies, policy makers, authorizers, charter management organizations, independent charter schools, and governing boards. Our capacities span the spectrum from national research analysis, to state policy to high-needs school improvement in settings from urban to rural. Support also can be focused to organize and facilitate inter-school collaboratives.

Image of Apple Tree logoAppleTree Institute

AppleTree, a research and development institute and public charter preschool with campuses across Washington, D.C., seeks to close the achievement gap before students get to kindergarten by providing three- and four-year-olds with the social, emotional, and cognitive foundations that enable them to thrive in school. AIR researchers will evaluate the expansion of AppleTree as they open nine new charter schools in the city over five years. 

Implementation of School Waiver Systems in Georgia

Through the Regional Education Laboratory Southeast, AIR researchers will study the implementation of Georgia’s school waiver systems, including Strategic Waiver School Systems and Charter School Systems, with a research alliance of Georgia education stakeholders focused on school flexibilities. In addition, AIR will provide training, coaching, and other technical assistance to states and local education agencies around school practices, policies, and research methodology. 

Improving the Quality of Charter Schools in Minnesota

The Midwest Comprehensive Center at AIR is providing support to the Minnesota Department of Education in its efforts to improve the quality of charter schools in Minnesota. Specifically, the Center developed a scan of authorizer/state education agency practices related to authorizer evaluation systems and charter applications. Center staff serve as a thought partner to strengthen the Department’s stakeholder engagement and resource dissemination through its charter school boot camp and charter conferences.

Latest Work

Infographic: Public Charter School Enrollment
23 Jan 2020
Q & A

As Charter Schools Expand, Research and Evidence-Based Practices Are Critical

Across 43 states and the District of Columbia, 7,000 charter schools now enroll more than 3 million students, according to a report co-authored by AIR. Megan Austin highlights how research and evidence-based practices can help charter management organizations and charter school leaders build capacity, develop effective teachers and leaders, and meet the needs of their students.
25 Sep 2019
Report

School Choice in the United States: 2019

School choice can describe a variety of things for different families.

20 May 2019 | 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Event

Charter Schools and Their Impacts on Students in the Short and Long Run

This presentation will discuss research on the effects of charter school enrollment on student outcomes. The webinar will include what we know (and don’t know) about the effects of charter school enrollment on both short-run outcomes like student test scores, as well as more recent evidence on long-run outcomes like college enrollment, persistence in college and earnings in the labor market.
12 Feb 2019
ESSA

Navigating ESSA with the AIR Co-Pilot: 13 Key Resources

State and school district leaders, whether relative newcomers to ESSA or entrenched in implementation, will find detailed information on states’ plans, policy, and research on educational practices in AIR’s ESSA Co-Pilot. The following 13 resources were chosen by AIR experts as the best entry point into this broad and deep topic.
9 May 2018
ESSA

ESSA │Charter Schools and School Choice

While state policy shapes the school choice landscape within individual states, there is a long history of federal support for choice options at the state and local levels. ESSA continues this support. AIR's team of technical assistance providers draws on the expertise of our many national centers and internationally-renowned experts.
Image of teacher and student
7 May 2018
Blog Post

Tracking Teacher Effectiveness Gaps Between Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools

Are teachers working in charter schools more effective in improving student outcomes compared to teachers working in traditional public schools? In this blog post, Umut Özek, a principal researcher at AIR, describes a new study in which he and his fellow authors examined the disparities in teacher effectiveness between charter schools and traditional public schools in Florida.
1 Apr 2018
Journal Article

Taking Stock of Private School Choice: Lessons Learned from Indiana

The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, launched in 2011, offers a rich opportunity to study how a large-scale tuition-voucher program works and to analyze the results it has produced in its first few years. This article describes the results of a four-year study of the Indiana program.
Image of high school teacher student at computer
25 Jan 2018
Report

Teacher Value-Added in Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools

Over the past three decades, charter schools have become the most popular form of school choice, especially in urban school districts. Using data from Florida, this study investigates the degree to which differences in teacher quality explain the effectiveness of charter schools.
13 Jan 2018
Report

Special Education Enrollment and Classification in Louisiana Charter Schools and Traditional Schools

Serving students with an individualized education program, which entitles them to special education services, can be a challenge for charter and traditional schools. This study is an exploratory analysis of special education enrollment rates in charter schools and traditional schools, as well as of factors associated with variations in classification and enrollment rates of students with an individualized education program across school types in the four educational regions of Louisiana that have three or more charter schools.
25 Jan 2017
Brief

Identifying South Carolina Charter Schools That Are “Beating the Odds”

Charter schools have become a widely used alternative to traditional public schools, and play an increasingly important role in state reform efforts. South Carolina stakeholders wanted to broaden their understanding of why some charter schools are more successful than others to inform their consideration of whether to expand this school choice option. This study identifies charter schools that are “beating the odds,” or performing better than expected in math and language arts, given the demographic characteristics of the students they serve.
30 Nov 2016
Brief

Leadership Characteristics and Practices in South Carolina Charter Schools

Charter school stakeholders in South Carolina expressed interest in understanding the leadership characteristics and practices of charter school leaders across the state. Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast helped develop an online survey of characteristics and practices that was administered by the South Carolina Department of Education to leaders of all charter schools in South Carolina. This report describes the process for developing the leadership survey and provides descriptive results of the survey.
19 Jul 2016
Brief

A New Approach to School Turnaround: Charter Operators Managing District Schools

For decades, charter schools and district-run schools have been placed on opposing sides by advocates and policymakers. With support from the state and other partners, the Lawrence Public School District (LPS) state receiver brought these two seemingly opposing ideas together as a turnaround strategy for the district’s lowest performing schools. This policy brief examines the LPS use of charter operators as managers of district schools with a goal of providing recommendations for future district turnaround efforts, drawing from the expertise of charter operators.
15 Dec 2015
Blog Post

Meet Three Charter Schools Successfully Serving Students with Disabilities

Charter schools were created to give parents more options for their children. With greater freedom to innovate than traditional public school classrooms, some charter schools may hold particular promise for students with disabilities, who by law are entitled to receive an education tailor-made to their needs. Zena Rudo tells the stories of three charter schools where students with disabilities exceeded district achievement averages for reading and math.
31 Jul 2014
Brief

Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) Implementation: Early Lessons From the Field

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) represents a fundamental transformation of the way California allocates state funds to school districts and the ways the state expects districts to make decisions about (and report on) the use of these funds. This brief identifies some early lessons about how best to use the new system to meet student needs, especially the traditionally underserved.
Terry Salinger
14 Jun 2014
Blog Post

What About ‘The Fifth’ Who Won’t Graduate from High School?

Starting in January, the GED got a lot harder; while the overhaul makes sense, doing well now requires a new level of help that too few studying for it can get. In this blog post, Terry Salinger points to the need for adult charter schools and wraparound services to address the needs of adult learners.
23 Jun 2013
Report

Evaluation of Hawaii's Weighted Student Formula

In June 2013, AIR completed an initial evaluation of the patterns of resource allocation and the attitudes and perspectives of various stakeholders about the implementation of Hawaii's weighted student formula (WSF). The findings of this evaluation show that implementation of Hawaii's WSF appears to have gained widespread acceptance among school leaders and some key stakeholders within the state.
12 Feb 2013
Toolkit

Special Education Start-Up and Implementation Tools for Charter School Leaders and Special Education Managers

This user-friendly guidebook and toolkit was developed by special education experts to support charter school leaders and special education managers as they build special education programs to serve students with disabilities.

27 May 2010
Report

Report Finds Number of Students Enrolled in Charter Schools Has Nearly Quadrupled Since 1999

The new “Condition of Education 2010” report, released May 27, 2010 by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES), found that from 1999 to 2008, the number of students enrolled in charter schools has nearly quadrupled, from 340,000 to 1.3 million students.

1 May 2010
Report

Charter and Innovative Schools: Emerging Trends Reflected in the State Phase 1 Race to the Top Applications

This report examines state methods of promoting charter and innovative schools, as mentioned in the Race to the Top applications.

1 May 2010
Report

Out of the Debate and Into the Schools: Comparing Practices and Strategies in Traditional, Pilot and Charter Schools in the City of Boston

The findings of this study suggest that middle and high school students who attend charter schools significantly outperform their counterparts attending traditional schools, while the differences in student performance between charter and pilot schools were mixed.

1 Jan 2009
Report

Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston's Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools

The first Charter School opened in Boston shortly after the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act in 1993. In 1995, the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teacher’s Union responded by creating their own version of the autonomous school model, known as the “Pilot School.” Fifteen years later, the goal of this report is to assess the impact of these new school models on student achievement.