As we get older, we sometimes find ourselves thinking about the “good old days,” which were often not quite as good as we remember them. That’s not a problem in the case of charter schools. It’s a pretty straightforward task to separate nostalgia from an impartial assessment of which charter laws work best. Our just released National Charter School Law Rankings offer a guide to their strengths and weaknesses in four key areas: authorizing bodies, limits to growth, operations, and equitable funding; and they provide a clear picture of the factors that drive success and failure.

Charter schools were born a quarter-century ago, when Minnesota enacted the first such law in the country. Although modified along the way, it remains one of the best laws in the U.S., and Minnesota’s 167 charter schools and more than 53,000 charter students are a testament to its success. In that respect, it is typical of states that embraced charters at the outset: of the 13 strongest charter laws, 12 became law between 1991 and 1999, and although 44 states and the District of Columbia now have charter laws, the original dozen (plus Indiana) account for more than 56 percent of today’s charter schools. The early adapters were faithful to the original charter school vision and had laws that struck a skillful balance between providing autonomy and requiring accountability.