In 1993, Colorado was an early adopter of charter schools. The original legislation, with some changes, has proved to be one of the nation’s best laws, in terms of encouraging growth of charter schools. The Center for Education Reform (CER), a champion of charters, ranks Colorado’s law #7 in the country, for encouraging charter growth (and the CER rankings are often used by researchers and others when comparing states).
Now, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a new study out that ranks states on their charter laws, but also includes more about implementation and authorization, and the quality of those efforts. In this new study, Colorado is ranked #5 best in the country, aggregating across 20 dimensions.
Since 11 states have no charter law (and hence no charter schools), and 13 more have caps that potentially will prevent them from winning Race to the Top monies, Colorado is in the higher echelon of the 25 states that have charter school sectors that put them in contention. This should help with the R2T competition.
I’m sure many charter school developers and operators would like to see an easier or clearer path to new schools in Colorado, but compared to the rest of the country, we are doing pretty well with charters.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Just to clarify, as a member of the team that worked on this study: The analysis focuses on state charter laws and the extent to which they create an environment conducive to a quality charter school sector. The focus of the analysis was NOT state implementation/practice or authorizing quality per se, but rather *the extent to which state laws support quality implementation* (including quality authorizing).