Category: charters

Performance of Charter Schools in Wake County

In 2017-18, there were 22 charter schools in Wake County. It’s hard to compare their performance with that of WCPSS district schools for several reasons. For one thing, the district has so many more schools (183), with wide variations in school populations, resources, and programs. For another, both traditional public schools (TPS) and charter schools must report many statistics. They might excel in one area while falling short in another. School Performance Grades (SPGs) are summaries that provide a clue, and most charters and TPS receive these annually. But some education experts believe that North Carolina’s SPGs are too heavily weighted toward test scores, and many argue that growth statistics are more accurate than performance statistics. (More on that later.) When assessing the effectiveness of […]

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Charter Schools Are Big News

Nationwide enrollment in charter schools was about 3.1 million students during the 2016-17 school year, as compared to 50.4 million students who attended U.S. public schools that same year. In 2017, 86,446 North Carolina students were enrolled in charter schools, while 1,432,507 students were enrolled in traditional public schools, or TPS. Charter schools receive public funding to provide students with a free K-12 education, and in exchange for accepting various oversight and reporting requirements, are allowed to operate with more freedom to (one hopes) both innovate and improve student outcomes. Typically, the funding comes as a per-student allocation that matches the amount spent by a local education agency for each public-school pupil. Following Hurricane Katrina, regulators converted the public schools in New Orleans to charters […]

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