About CharterLookup
CharterLookup is an independent project that aggregates publicly-available records about U.S. charter schools — authorizer history, renewal and revocation events, closure dates and reasons, enrollment, race/ethnicity demographics, CMO/EMO affiliation, contact information, and community discussion — and puts one page per school online so families, researchers, and journalists can find them.
What we publish
- Per-school detail pages with name, location, opened and (if applicable) closed dates, current status, enrollment, authorizer, CMO/EMO operator, grade range, program type, principal, phone, website, and race/ethnicity breakdown.
- Per-county and per-state index pages listing all charter schools we have on file.
- Per-authorizer pages (state charter boards, districts, university authorizers) listing their schools.
- Per-CMO/EMO pages for the operator chains.
- Closure event records with the verbatim source language and a citation link to the underlying state or federal document.
- User comments (Google sign-in required) so parents, alumni, and teachers can add what the records don't capture.
Where the data comes from
Every fact on the site is sourced from public records — the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data (CCD), state Departments of Education, state charter-school authorizer boards, and (occasionally) charter-school operator websites. Each page links out to the upstream source where possible. The full inventory of sources is on the data sources page.
What we do not do
- We do not score, rank, or rate schools. Our job is to surface the records, not to grade the school based on them.
- We do not collect student data. We do not host student-level identifiable information. Aggregate counts (e.g., total enrollment) come from federal/state aggregate files that already suppress small cells per FERPA rules.
- We are not affiliated with any charter school, network, advocacy group, or government agency.
Corrections
If you see something wrong — outdated principal, miscoded closure reason, missing school, etc. — please email corrections@charterlookup.net with the school name, the field that's wrong, the correct value, and (ideally) a link to a primary source we can cite. We review every correction.
Contact
See the contact page for the right address for press, data-correction, partnership, or privacy inquiries.