Lessons From New Orleans' Experience as a Charter School Laboratory

Rhode Island has stringent requirements for charter schools, with strong systems for oversight and accountability and provisions intended to limit harm to existing school districts and ensure the charters are representative of their communities. Charter school students in the state are making bigger standardized testing gains than their peers in traditional public schools.

The Summit Learning Program is an online program that offers personalized lessons in science, social studies, math, and English language arts for students in grades four through 12. “Nearly 400 schools use it across 40 states.” The Hechinger Report spent a year exploring the platform in schools, while there are some drawbacks there’s also evidence it works. In some schools, student test scores jumped after using Summit.

With support from Kansas City Public Schools, a group has built an innovative new charter school that incorporates family services and social services into the fabric of the school. Kansas City Neighborhood Academy follows in the successful footsteps of a charter in Georgia and serves as a pilot project and important learning experience for the rest of Kansas City's schools.

The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools, and is now producing some of the highest graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and average test scores in public schools in the nation.

The Charter School for Applied Technologies has the highest graduation rate in Erie County, despite its predominantly poor, minority student makeup, in large part simply by instilling high expectations.

Bangladesh schools had very low attendance because children were kept home to work and conditions were unsafe for girls, ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities. BRAC, one of the world's largest and most comprehensive NGOs, has built new schools addressing all the reasons, at home and school, that were preventing children from attending.

To help shore up learning gaps in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, two Indiana middle schools doubled students’ instructional time in English and math, dedicating two class periods to each subject each day. The state also made it easier for schools to test students throughout the year instead of just once at the end of the year, providing checkpoints for educators to measure their progress and tailor instruction accordingly.

Belmont Charter School offers a year-round program that includes camp-style activities, work-study programs, job training, and classroom learning in small groups during the summer. Teachers still receive several weeks off before summer programming starts, and students say the summer options help them build real-world skills and explore topics that aren’t always covered during the regular school year.

A solar panel array at the Steelton-Highspire School District generates enough energy to meet the schools’ needs, and the switch to solar is estimated to save the district $1.6 million over the next 20 years, which it can use to improve programming for students.

Reforms that improved learning at Denver schools included easier paperwork for school of choice applications, an increased number of charter schools, and the closing of schools with low test scores.