The policy environment for charter schools ranges across the states from fairly favorable to suspicious and hostile. In Arkansas, the outlook for charter schools got a little bit better.

The Arkansas Policy Foundation reports in a memo (not online) that the legislature has expanded the charter school act. Good thing, too.

In 1996 the Foundation wrote that the state's year-old charter school was "crafted primarily by the teacher's union (AEA)," and so none of the schools were in the state. But reformers take note: sometimes a bad law can be improved in time. The law was expanded in 1999, 2005, and now, March of 2007.

Says the Foundation, "A key provision allows a successful open-enrollment charter to open an unlimited number of schools subject to state Board of Education approval if it has not been subject to any disciplinary action, or has been classified as in academic or fiscal distress."

An expansion in 2005 allowed for an unlimited number of charters by the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). The most recent rule change "allows an unlimited number of charters per [congressional] district, a key revision that will increase competition in regions of the state where the K-12 system is providing an inferior product to parents and students." Remarkably, the state Senate passed the measure on a vote of 35 to 0.

Another significant change to the law: local school boards no longer have veto power over the establishment of charter schools within their geographic scope. That requirement is still in place in the nearby state of Kansas.