Data Collection and Reporting

NACSA’s 2023 authorizer survey (covering the 2021-2022 academic year) included 53 questions on a range of topics related to charter school authorizing, including application practices, charter renewal & revocation, and authorizer staffing. This year’s survey also included a set of questions on authorizer practices related to special education. The 2023 survey sample includes authorizers collectively overseeing nearly 2/3 of all charter schools across the country. Like prior surveys, the 2023 survey responses were self-reported by authorizing institutions and were collected via a secure online platform.

NACSA collects data from authorizers of all sizes and types but focuses on authorizers with scale, that is authorizers overseeing 5 or more charter schools. Like prior samples, the 2023 sample is expansive (i.e., authorizers overseeing nearly 2/3 of all charter schools in the country) enabling reliable claims about general trends across the sector. It is also representative of authorizers with some scale (i.e., those with 5 or more schools). Caution should be using these results to make inferences about smaller authorizers (i.e., those with less than 5 schools) as the sample under-represents those authorizers.