Update: The good people of Ed News Colorado have also written about The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF), breaking down some of the key information if you don’t have time to dig through the whole report.

Do you need a good reference digest of important information on charter schools in Colorado? Well, my friend and Education Policy Center senior fellow Krista Kafer has done it again, joining Dr. Dick Carpenter to co-author another valuable report for the Colorado Department of Education.

The brand new report is called The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF). Skim through it, and you’ll see there really is no such thing as an average charter school. As the movement has grown in our state over the last 15 years, both the number and the diversity of charters has increased.

Still, as the report shows, Colorado’s charter schools also stand out from other states. As a whole, they tend to be more suburban and more likely to use the Core Knowledge program, while still enrolling a nearly representative percentage of poor and minority students. Colorado charter schools also are much less likely to be run by for-profit Education Management Organizations.

Charters come in many different population sizes, and both their academic performance and growth show mixed results in comparison to traditional public schools.

Anyway, you can find out a lot more by reading Kafer and Carpenter’s The State of Charter Schools in Colorado (PDF).

Other great sources on Colorado charter schools:

• A Typology of Colorado Charter Schools 2009 by Kafer and Carpenter (PDF)
• Colorado League of Charter Schools
• Colorado Charters blog
• Colorado Department of Education, Charter School Unit
• Charter School Institute
• A Parent’s Voice

And of course ….