The National Center on School Choice is funded by the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The Center exercises national leadership in school choice research, including charter and magnet schools, private school vouchers, teacher recruitment, school management, and state policymaking.

Surveying High-Achieving Charter Schools:
Identifying Best Practices

Tom Loveless, Brookings Institution

It is important to discover the best practices of high-achieving charter schools. If research ultimately finds that charter schools produce positive results, what practices are they using to succeed? If negative results are found, what changes need to occur for charters to improve?  This study seeks to identify the curricula and teaching methods employed in the most successful charter schools using the Northwest Evaluation Association/Vanderbilt surveys of charter and regular public schools in four states. The aim is to explain the variation in charter school test scores, and then identify reasons why high-achieving charter schools deliver academic benefits. We hope to examine how these schools approach curriculum content and teaching practices, and ultimately how the approaches influence student learning.