National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
January 2010
Finally, a strong, modern, quality-centered metric by which to judge the strength of state charter laws! The Center for Education Reform did pioneering and valuable work in this area but its metric is limited and somewhat archaic, having more to do with schools’ freedom from regulation than with their performance or their states’ accountability expectations. In this new report, the Alliance compares actual state charter laws with a model law that they developed, and ranks the forty states with such laws on elements like quality, accountability, and funding equity. “Quality control” measures (e.g., requiring performance-based contracts and having comprehensive charter school monitoring and data collection processes) are weighted the most heavily. Minnesota, DC, and California came out on top; Iowa, Alaska, and Maryland at the bottom. The indicators are presented separately so that state policymakers, charter advocates, foes, and researchers alike can zero in on the elements that matter most to them. There’s a minor methodological quibble, however, which is more one of adequate explanation than analytical error; NAPCS fails to differentiate which scores derive specifically from state laws and which also derive from practice, which they took into consideration in three of the categories (e.g., on charter caps, they consider also if the state is at or approaching the cap). You can find the report itself and an accompanying online database of its contents here.