While Virginia’s law does not contain a cap on public charter school growth, it only allows district authorizers and provides little autonomy, insufficient accountability, and inequitable funding.
Virginia’s law needs improvement across the board. Potential starting points include expanding authorizing options, beefing up the law’s application, oversight, and renewal requirements, increasing operational autonomy, ensuring equitable operational funding and equitable access to capital funding and facilities, and ensuring transparency regarding educational service providers.
Since Virginia does not allow full-time virtual charter schools, the highest score possible is 228 for the remaining 20 components. However, we converted this score to one that is comparable to the states that allow full-time virtual charter schools. Virginia received 89 out of the 228 points available for the remaining 20 components, or 39 percent. We then multiplied the total points possible for all 21 components (240) by 39 percent to get a score comparable to the other states (94).