Frederick M. Hess's Blog
The State of Charter School Authorizing
by Frederick M. Hess • May 6, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Cross-posted from Education Week
 Print |  Send |  RSS |
Today, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) released its second annual survey of charter school authorizers (full disclosure: I'm a member of the NACSA board of directors). The survey included all authorizers with ten or more schools--accounting for nearly two-thirds of the nation's charter schools--and a sample of smaller authorizers.
The report offers some terrifically informative data even before one gets to the survey results (even more disclosure: I'm a member of the research advisory board that assisted with the survey). Discussions of chartering and charter authorizing are frequently clouded by confusion as to just what they entail. The report addresses this with a snapshot of the nation's authorizers, and the picture may surprise some casual observers; of the nation's 872 authorizers, 89 percent are local education agencies (e.g. school districts). Five percent are institutions of higher education. And all the rest of the authorizers combined, including state boards, mayors, non-profits, and so on, barely amount to 5 percent of the authorizer population.
That said, districts account for well under half of the big authorizers (again, those with 10 or more schools),
