Track the dramatic expansion of charter schools across the U.S. and trace the major factors in this important trend, with our interactive map and timeline.

Since early 2009, the Columbia News21 team took notebooks, cameras and curiosities to places such as New Orleans, the Twin Cities, Newark, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., to explore the new marketplace of hybrid, public-private schools.

The result is this web site -- a deeply reported, richly multimedia and interactive web site, produced by a dozen Columbia journalism fellows, their editors and a group of new media producers.

Learn how Catholic school education and American Indian school programs have developed since the country's founding, in our clickable multimedia timelines.