ABSTRACT
The variation in charter school effects raises the question of what characteristics distinguish good charter schools from bad ones. Can we identify the policies and practices that make a charter school successful? And can these policies and practices be replicated in other charter or traditional public schools equally successfully? This chapter addresses these questions by summarizing the research on factors associated with successful charter schools. To really understand how particular policies or practices influence a charter school's success, one would ideally randomly assign these policies and practices to a group of charter schools and then measure their influence on the schools' impacts. While a successful charter school should lead to a wide variety of positive student outcomes, most prior research studies have focused on the outcome of student achievement as measured by performance on standardized assessments in reading and math.
