ABSTRACT
Among the several strategies for creating parental choice among schools in the United States, the charter school movement has been by far the most successful. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) recently published the results of their analysis of relevant state legislation to identify the original goals to be attained by charter schools. This chapter is based on data from the School Questionnaire of the 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which is the largest survey in the United States of public, private, and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. The School Questionnaire included items on school type, grade levels, student enrollment, and programs offered. Based on the samples of charter and regular schools completing the SASS School Questionnaire, we computed weighted national estimates of the numbers of schools and numbers of students enrolled in these schools of each type included in the design using special procedures developed by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for complex sample survey data.
