The Public Charter School Dashboard

NAPCS codes the year open for public charter schools as the first year the school enrolled students. Charter schools may have received contract approval from their authorizer in a previous year.

NAPCS uses the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data to code the geographic location of charter schools. NAPCS collapsed data from CCD into four main categories:

• City: city, large; city, mid-size; city, small
  
• Suburb: suburb, large; suburb, mid-size; suburb, small
  
• Town: town, fringe; town, distant; town, remote
  
• Rural: rural, fringe; rural, distant; rural, remote
  

Annually, NAPCS collects information on the conversion/start-up status of charter schools from state departments of education and charter support organizations.

• Start-Up = Charter school is a new school unaffiliated with any preexisting school
• Conversion = The school converted to a charter school from a traditional public school or a private school

Annually, NAPCS collects information that links charter schools with their authorizer. The data come from state departments of education, authorizers, and charter support organizations. NAPCS follows the National Association of Charter School Authorizer's (NACSA) classification of types of authorizers: Local Education Agency, State Board of Education, Independent Charter School Board, Municipal Government Office, Higher Education Institution, and Non-for-Profit Organization.

NAPCS geocodes the location of charter schools onto Congressional District boundary maps to determine the Congressional District. The Congressional District data presented on the Dashboard are for the 112th Congress.

NAPCS codes charter schools for management organizations from the Profiles of For-Profit and Nonprofit Education Management Organizations reports authored by researchers at Western Michigan University and published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. The most recent report can be found here.

• CMO = Charter Management Organization (nonprofit)
  
• EMO = Education Management Organization (for-profit)
  
• Freestanding = A charter school that is not affiliated with a management organization (also called independent, mom and pop, stand-alone, etc.)

In 2009-10, NAPCS collected data to determine the teachers’ union status of every charter school nationwide. NAPCS defined a charter school as unionized if it had a collective bargaining agreement with a teachers’ union or association. There were additional charter schools without collective bargaining agreements that hired teachers who were members of a teachers’ union. These schools were not counted as being unionized.

NAPCS collected union data by contacting a variety of sources within each state. The sources included state departments of education, charter school support organizations and resource centers, charter school authorizers, national union organizations, and local affiliates of the national union organizations.

For more information see Details from the Dashboard report.

NAPCS coded charter schools for extended learning time from Tracking an Emerging Movement: A Report on Expanded-time Schools in America, a report by the National Center on Time & Learning.