Colorado and Massachusetts charter schools may be leaders here where too many of their counterparts in Minnesota and California have been asleep at the wheel. The work of several forward-thinking charter school administrators and Colorado Department of Education staffer Bill Windler may play a strong role here. Six of the fourteen schools were able to demonstrate that they have met or exceed a significant proportion of their performance goals and five more were able to document meeting or making progress toward most of their goals. The remaining three were not able to provide sufficient data to document such progress. Colorado is an exception to the apparent national trend of charter schools serving high proportions of underprivileged students.
Charter schools enjoy extraordinarily high levels of parent involvement.
Both finance and facilities concerns weigh heavily on the schools. Charter schools are making heavy use of the state's application-based waiver process. All of the schools requested at least one waiver and most requested multiple waivers. The most popular waivers related to laws that protect the interests of the adults working in the system, including administrator certification, teacher salary and employment, and local district governing board control laws. This cautious note is perhaps the most substantive policy recommendation arising from any of the three reports.