The effectiveness of charter schools in raising student achievement has become an intensely debated issue. When we last considered this topic (10/08/2009), the Department of Education was pushing charter schools but dueling studies introduced uncertainty.

School accountability for student outcomes is central to current policy discussions. While the policy idea is often attributed simply to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 44 states already had some form of test-based accountability when the 2002 federal accountability law came into existence. With NCLB, test-based accountability became a national strategy. It placed a clear goal on improvements in student achievement and established a series of actions and penalties for failure to meet annual improvement goals.

Over the last 40 years, the state courts have become important players in the funding of America’s public schools. During this period, only a handful of states have escaped state court scrutiny over the allocation and amount of funding they devote to their K-12 schools. Initially, these state court orders focused on the allocation of money between school districts, requiring many states to change their education financing systems to more equitably distribute school funding.

This has been a good year for evidence on the effectiveness of charters, highlighted by a major national study from CREDO and a new study in the continuing work from New York City. Nonetheless, understanding and interpreting the scientific research within the political and media environment is made more difficult by the political context. Charter schools have received considerable attention since President Obama put them on the administration’s policy agenda.

One sleeper in the flurry of decisions at the end of the last U.S. Supreme Court term has to be the decision in Horne v. Flores, a long-running Arizona case about funding special programs for English Language Learners (ELL). In overturning lower court decisions calling for continued court-ordered school spending without regard to student outcomes, the Court may lead to a new era of more rational and effective court involvement in school funding policies.