With the enrollment flexibility and design choices available to them, charter schools have the potential to help reverse trends of school segregation—or to further isolate students by race and class. This project looks at the charter school policies and enrollment patterns in the forty-three states, plus the District of Columbia, with functional charter school laws to see how well states are supporting the use of the charter school model as a tool for promoting racial and socioeconomic integration. How does your state stack up? Click on the map to see.
Each state has three scores, with each score having a possible range of 0% (worst) to 100% (best).
The policy score indicates how many key provisions supporting school integration are included in the state’s charter policies.
The enrollment score indicates how well, in practice, charter schools are functioning as tools for racial integration in a state, based on whether including charter schools in the calculation increases or decreases the index of dissimilarity across a county.
The overall score averages the policy score and the enrollment score to provide a measure of how well a state is supporting integration in charter school, both through policy and in practice.