Abstract: This document analyzes North Carolina's 10-year history with charter schools. Those schools now enroll about 30,000 students, but growth is limited by a statutory cap of 100 schools. The author finds that the state's charter schools have low average school and class sizes, innovative curricula and instructional approaches, few disciplinary problems, and student performance comparable to district schools. He seeks to debunk some studies that have shown that N.C.'s charter school students have fallen short academically. Along with lifting the charter school cap, the report recommends that policymakers endorse an "Education Bill of Rights" that ties state funding to a student, not to a school system; create franchises that would allow successful charter school operators to avoid the state's application and approval process; and reconfigure the state's lottery formula to allow some lottery proceeds to flow to charter school students.
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