News

Strong Growth Of Public Charter School Sector

on Jul 09, 2009 by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Washington, D.C - The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools today released the 2009 Public Charter School Dashboard, a new comprehensive report documenting strong growth in the public charter school sector. Since 2007-08, the charter student population has grown 11% and the number of public charter schools has grown 8%. More than 1.4 million students now attend over 4,600 public charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia. The Dashboard, available online at www.publiccharters.org/dashboard, is the largest set of statistical indicators describing public charter school growth and quality ever compiled.

Key findings of the Dashboard include:

•Charters serve a higher percentage of non-white students and students from low-income families than other public schools. 62% of public charter school students are non-white and 48% qualify for free and reduced-price lunch (compared with 47% non-white and 45% free and reduced price lunch in other public schools).
•Charter schools are maturing. As of the 2008-09 academic year, 23% of public charter schools have been open at least 10 years. Four years ago, only 7% of public charter schools had been open more than 10 years.
•Charters are concentrated in urban areas, but are seeing growth in rural areas. While 56% of students attend public charter schools in large cities, a growing percentage of students are enrolled in public charter schools in rural areas (14% compared with 11% five years ago).
•Charters innovate with grade configurations. Nearly 30% of students attend public charter schools with non-traditional grade configurations, such as Kindergarten through 12th grade (compared with less than 7% of non-charter school students).
"With a wealth of information on performance and trends, the Dashboard will help policymakers make sound decisions about public charter schools," said Nelson Smith President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "For example, research has suggested that as public charter schools get older and more experienced, they become better at providing high quality learning environments. One of the Dashboard's key findings is that a larger proportion of charters has now been open more than 10 years. This finding leads us to believe that more public charter schools are in a position to provide a better learning environment than ever before."

"With more than 10 times the amount of data previously available, the Dashboard is a tool for looking at the charter school movement nationally and by state," said Anna Nicotera, the Alliance's Director of Research and Evaluation who led the production of the Dashboard. "New to this edition are two important academic performance indicators (ACT scores and SAT scores), individual dashboards for each of the 41 jurisdictions with public charter schools, and a companion on-line database allowing users to create custom reports from the data."

Continued development for the online database will allow users to view and generate reports from district and school level data this fall. To keep abreast of the latest data additions, sign up to receive Alliance notifications at http://action.publiccharters.org/site/Survey.

Contact:
Bill Schulz
(202) 521-2828
Sarah Johnson
(202) 521-2826
pressroom@publiccharters.org

VIEW THE REPORT

Categories: Education News Research