Previous efforts to identify promising practices in charter schools have often relied on self-reported practices from high-performing schools, with little assessment of local context, generalizability, or scalability of the specific practice. Using that approach, states have typically identified the high-performing schools first (based on school performance) and then asked the schools to identify practices to highlight.

This brief, developed by the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center at WestEd, presents states and their charter schools with an alternative — an evidence-based framework for identifying innovations and promising practices that can be reported on and shared with the broader education community, including other charter schools and traditional schools and districts.

Individual charter schools can also use this framework to examine their own practices for impact and effectiveness. In an era when states and districts are increasingly focused on using improvement science and implementing evidence-based initiatives, the processes and protocols included in the brief are intended to extend those same concepts to the charter sector.