I was just looking at some updated “State Education Reform” statistics from the National Center of Education Statistics and was trying to make sense of the numbers of charter schools in each state. California has the most charter schools by far at 908, but it’s also the most populous state. So I decided to rank some of the states with high numbers of charter schools by the number of charter schools per capita. I was surprised to see that Louisiana doesn’t rise to the top, but Wisconsin does. Chained below are the original figures.
| State | Number of Charter Schools Operating 2010-11 | Population (US Census 2010) | Charter Schools Per Capita |
| Arizona | 519 | 6,392,017 | 8.1195E-05 |
| Wisconsin | 207 | 5,686,986 | 3.63989E-05 |
| Colorado | 168 | 5,029,196 | 3.34049E-05 |
| Minnesota | 176 | 5,303,925 | 3.3183E-05 |
| Michigan | 300 | 9,883,640 | 3.03532E-05 |
| Ohio | 339 | 11,536,504 | 2.9385E-05 |
| Oregon | 108 | 3,831,074 | 2.81905E-05 |
| California | 908 | 37,253,956 | 2.43733E-05 |
| Florida | 458 | 18,801,310 | 2.436E-05 |
| Texas | 561 | 25,145,561 | 2.23101E-05 |
| Louisiana | 76 | 4,533,372 | 1.67646E-05 |
| Pennsylvannia | 145 | 12,702,379 | 1.14152E-05 |
| North Carolina | 99 | 9,535,483 | 1.03823E-05 |
| New York | 170 | 19,378,102 | 8.77279E-06 |
Number of public charter schools operating, by state: 2010–11
Source: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Table 4.3 of State Education Reforms
