State charter school laws greatly affect the long-term success or failure of a state’s charter sector, concludes a report by the Washington-based think tank Education Sector.
The study, which found that the efficacy of charter schools largely varied with state laws, aims to determine the most effective state laws for promoting a healthy charter school environment. Some suggestions include requiring high-quality student-performance data from all charter schools, refraining from putting absolute caps on the number of charter schools that can open in the state, providing equitable funding for charter schools, and offering incentives for such schools to open in underserved communities.
Data for the study of the independent public schools came from charter schools in 12 states.