The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has as one of its important policy goals expanding the number of high-quality public school choice options. Specifically, according to Part B section 5201 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, two of the established purposes of the Charter School Program office are: evaluating the effects of charter schools, including the effects on students, student academic achievement, staff and parents, and expanding the number of high-quality charter schools available to students across the nation.
Charter school authorization is at the very crux of any efforts to expand and ensure high-quality public school choice options through public charter schools because charter school authorizers are the public entities primarily responsible for: initial charter authorizations, on-going monitoring and oversight, and charter renewal and closure decisions. This data collection provides information to a comprehensive national database of roughly 900 charter school authorizers complete with the schools under their authority; some of these data elements are available from public documents, but they are not made available to the public consistently across all authorizers. This is a comprehensive, fully-populated tool for tracking the activities of and evaluating the quality of authorizers nationwide based on their authorizing decisions in light of schools' performance. This instrument will be administered to all charter school authorizers.
PL:
Pub.L. 107 - 110 5201
Name of Law: Elementaray and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended
On behalf of this Federal agency, I certify that the collection of information encompassed by this request complies with 5 CFR 1320.9 and the related provisions of 5 CFR 1320.8(b)(3).
The following is a summary of the topics, regarding the proposed collection of information, that the certification covers:
(i) Why the information is being collected;
(ii) Use of information;
(iii) Burden estimate;
(iv) Nature of response (voluntary, required for a benefit, or mandatory);
(v) Nature and extent of confidentiality; and
(vi) Need to display currently valid OMB control number;
If you are unable to certify compliance with any of these provisions, identify the item by leaving the box unchecked and explain the reason in the Supporting Statement.