This is a guest post by Anson Jackson, a Texas-based partner at Bellwether who leads academic advising work. Agree or disagree he’d welcome your feedback and engagement either way. Anson’s in a lot of schools, all around the country. (As with all content here, it’s the views of the author alone, Bellwether has never taken institutional positions and encourages a diversity of viewpoints across our team.)
Charters Have a Quality Problem. Collective Action is Part of the Solution. – By Anson Jackson
The party-splitting politics of President Trump’s new tax credit scholarship program are getting the attention of education advocates. Yet that is obscuring another story: public charter schools are also seeing a surge in support. The charter sector enjoyed steady growth over the past several decades, and charters are increasingly popular among parents. After years of flat funding, charters are one of the only education programs to see an increase in the president’s recent budget proposal. Despite this popularity, however, charters today aren’t consistently delivering the high-quality education students and families deserve.
Parents should have options as to how to best educate their children, and excellent charter schools should be one of them. I’ve taught in and led public charter school networks, and my own children benefited from attending a charter school. A growing number of families seem to want the same, with nearly three fourths of parents saying they’d consider sending their child to a public charter school if one were available.
In theory, charters allow more autonomy for schools — and more options for students — in exchange for increased accountability. In my work supporting and leading schools, I’ve seen a lot of innovative ideas that, if implemented well, would change students’ lives. But that promise falls apart if charter schools can’t deliver a high-quality education to all students. For the sector to succeed, persistently low-quality schools can’t be a part of the equation.
To solve the sector’s growing quality problem, leaders must rethink how charter accountability works. Everyone who supports a charter school — from authorizers and funders to boards and charter support organizations — must take a more coordinated approach to improving school quality and giving parents and students a real choice. Here’s what that might look like.
Authorizers should be involved from day one
Many new charter leaders have incredible visions for teaching and learning, but lack experience in school operations. Others are strong entrepreneurs with expertise in other fields, but have limited school leadership experience. During the application period, charter leaders must identify the support and training they’ll need; in exchange, authorizers should ensure that leaders follow through with training and perform well in their roles. Authorizers can also help leaders uphold their promises, and address their own blindspots, by taking an active role in charter planning and design. That means reviewing charter design elements — like the instructional model, curriculum, and staffing practices — and offering timely, two-way feedback that helps leaders keep the school’s vision and mission central as it evolves.
Charters need longer pathways of support
Most charters close due to issues that come up not during the design and authorization phase, but during implementation. Ongoing collaboration among all stakeholders is crucial to ensuring a charter’s continued success.
In addition to providing support up front, authorizers must continue to set and hold a high bar for quality of training, and hold schools accountable if leaders aren’t following through. Other stakeholders — like charter incubators, funders, and support organizations — also play a role in helping charters maintain quality by providing support beyond year one. These stakeholders can help provide technical assistance, coaching, and curriculum implementation during the charter’s first year, and can tailor support for subsequent years based on the school’s performance and needs. This kind of adaptive partnership may be different than what charter leaders are used to, but it means they can address problems before they arise.
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Charters need systems to track progress
Too often, quality slips because a charter doesn’t have the right metrics or systems in place to track its success. In my work with charters, I’ve seen many schools struggle with financial issues in their second or third years that should have been addressed in year one. This doesn’t just hurt the school; it negatively impacts outcomes.
To solve problems like these, charter school leaders and boards need clear and sustainable systems that track their schools’ financial, academic, and operational performances. Instead of remaining far removed from decision-making, authorizers must work in partnership with charter school leaders, boards, and community members to create strong, proactive systems of support and shared accountability that center student needs and anticipate challenges. These systems must be aligned with authorizer requirements and research-based measures of school quality, and include benchmarks of distress to allow leaders to act quickly to identify problems. Authorizers can also require this data to be submitted at regular intervals, regularly monitoring metrics to flag issues early.
This type of intervention isn’t too much oversight; it’s actually putting students’ needs first. Charters need these proactive checks in place to make sure they can catch issues and address them before it’s too late.
The right board is critical to success
Charter schools are nonprofit organizations run by volunteer boards. While only authorizers can review, renew, and revoke charters, it’s up to the board of each charter school or network to make sure the school is fulfilling the promises in the charter in between authorizer review cycles. For this reason, authorizers deserve a role in building the right board. While this might sound controversial, boards without the right makeup of members to support and hold the charter leader accountable lessen a school’s chances of success. Authorizers can provide schools with a range of supports to ensure quality board makeup – ranging from indirect assistance, like providing a rubric for board quality, to a direct approach, like identifying potential board members with the right expertise. Regardless of the level of support, authorizers cannot take a hands-off approach.
Charters must embrace transparency
All parents and taxpayers deserve to know how public schools in their communities are performing. All public schools should be transparent, but because of charters’ autonomy, this is even more important in the charter sector. Families and community members need to understand how metrics do or don’t align with the school’s mission and have a consistent understanding of how their children are performing in school, the school’s financial status, and the makeup of the school’s leadership and staff. Withholding performance information from families, good or bad, is malpractice.
Charter boards, support organizations, and funders should partner together to provide regular, accessible updates to their communities. This might mean reimagining the use of social media, community events, and how and when board meetings are conducted to ensure community members always have access to the information they need. Social media and other communications strategies offer opportunities for schools to increase transparency and communicate with parents and community members about school performance.
It’s a time of political pressure on the charter sector but there are also opportunities for positive change — collective action among authorizers, charter boards, and leaders must be part of the solution. If the charter sector embraces this type of collaboration and support today, in the coming years, it can truly deliver on its promise to provide the high-quality outcomes that every student deserves.
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View the original article and our Inspiration here