Public Impact

High-Quality Charter Schools

Report: Trends, Possible Improvements in School Quality Rating Systems

A new review of 25 school quality rating systems by Public Impact’s Lyria Boast and Tim Field for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools revealed clear trends that may help rating system designers and users think about optimal system designs.

The rating systems inventoried included some from state departments of education, large public school districts, charter associations and authorizers, and private news and advocacy organizations. Among the trends they found among the systems were:

  • the inclusion of student growth, useful for evaluating a school’s quality based on its students’ progress–a new standard, the authors say, for quality rating systems.
  • the expansion of college- and career-readiness measures–going beyond graduation rates to include important, new indicators.
  • an exploration of new ways to focus attention on the lowest-performing students–as the authors say, “great schools are great for all students in the building.”
  • an interest in valid measures of student engagement–although systems focus on academic outcomes, some try to capture school culture as well.
  • simplified reporting formats to categorize school quality.
  • an increase in data transparency and public accessibility–so that a rating system can be judged not just by its accuracy, but by how available its data is to users.

Friendly Competition Does the presence of charters spur public schools to improve?

By Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Next. Everyone has read the ubiquitous feature story about a charter school–Jane and John Q. Public and their friends, sitting around somebody’s kitchen table, dream up a different kind of school for their kids. Putting in hours of sweat equity, charging start-up costs to their credit cards, maybe […]