Missouri’s charter school movement is strong

Missouri’s charter school movement is strong, according to a report Monday from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The Alliance, which evaluates the health of charter public schools in key states, ranked Missouri 10th out of 18 states reviewed. The states are evaluated based on areas such as having a high percentage of special-focus schools; strong academic growth in math, on average, when compared with traditional public school students; and a decrease in the percentage of low-performing charter public schools.

“Each year the Missouri charter school landscape continues to grow and mature, providing more and more quality public school options for our state's children,” Doug Thaman, Executive Director of the Missouri Public Charter School Association, said in a statement.

Missouri’s law only allows charter schools within the Kansas City and St. Louis school district boundaries, and that limits enrollment, the report said. Only 2 percent of the state’s public school children attend charter schools, and that has not changed since the last report in the 2014 -2015 school year.

The report is intended as a companion to the Alliance’s annual evaluation of the strength of each state’s charter public school law.

The report finds that states with higher rankings are strong in many of the following areas: they have a large percentage of students in charter schools, strong rates of new schools opening, and they serve a significant amount of historically underserved students.

Washington D.C. tops the ranking, followed by Indiana, Michigan, Massachusetts and Louisiana. At the bottom of the list were Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Utah and Oregon.

This story was originally published March 7, 2016 at 12:51 PM with the headline "Missouri’s charter school movement is strong."