Good point, well aligned with our One Million Lives campaign, and a useful tonic for “irrational exuberance.”  In 2005, when NAPCS published the report of our Task Force on Quality and Accountability (which included NACSA CEO Greg Richmond), one of our key principles was this:  “Charter schools must achieve at high levels—not just offering something marginally better than failing neighboring schools, but providing the kind of education that equips graduates for success in postsecondary education, fulfilling work in the 21st century economy, and responsible citizenship.”

So, no question about it, we should be cracking down on any school that boasts about moving students from the first to the second percentile and calling it a “100% gain.”

But Dr. Finn makes the mistake of including this analogy in his brief treatise:  “Would you be satisfied with your golf score if it were a few points lower than someone who shoots 100?” Well……personally, I’d be THRILLED, having spent ten years flogging away and never doing better than 108 for 18 holes. I’m starting from such a pathetically lousy base that shooting a 98 would demand long, loud celebration.

So, back to the topic.  Today comes news from New Orleans that the charter-dominant Recovery School District ranked 57^th out of Louisiana’s 70 public school districts on this spring’s tests. Which would be pretty awful had the RSD not inherited the lowest-performing schools in a system that was dead last 8 years ago, and had the overall proficiency rate in their schools not jumped from 28% in 2008 to 57% this year.  Combined with more modest gains by the generally selective (and historically higher-performing) Orleans Parish schools, that means New Orleans as a whole is within shooting distance of overtaking statewide performance, as shown in the chart below.

Source; Educate Now! 2000-2011 includes grades 3-11 LEAP, iLeap, and GEE. 2012-2013 includes only grades 3-8 LEAP and iLeap because the GEE has been phased out and replaced by End of Course Tests and the ACT.

Now in absolute terms, I’d have to concede that there’s a way to go.  Louisiana is not in the top rank of achievement among states. But gains like these are the foundation for making its graduates truly competitive on the national and world stage.  You don’t get there overnight.

That’s why we celebrate gains, as long as they’re real and on a high enough trajectory to take kids to parity and beyond in the desperately short time schools have them.

Last week Nelson Smith and I were in South Carolina, talking with a variety of state officials and stakeholders about H 3853, a forward-thinking bill that contains strong provisions on charter school accountability.  The bill sailed through the House with unanimous support and last week was voted out of the Senate K-12 Education Subcommittee.  Next it has to get out of the full Education Committee and to the Senate floor before session adjourns on June 6th.  The Public Charter School Alliance of South Carolina is already planning for next year and we may see proposals on authorizer accountability, facilities, transportation, higher education authorizers, and virtual schools.  Keep your eyes on South Carolina as a developing leader on authorizer policy.

We also continue to keep an eye on Texas as a conference committee convenes to hash out differences between the House and Senate versions of SB 2.  We are hopeful that strong accountability provisions will remain a highlight of this sweeping legislation.

When the idea of charter schools was first conceived, Minnesota legislators focused on innovation, experimentation, and flexibility and believed that new and better school models would organically emerge and help shape the traditional school sector.  They imagined autonomous schools and “sponsors” helping these autonomous schools succeed.  Many sponsors created schools that were an extension of their mission or social service programs.  Innovation and autonomy in the charter sector continue to shape public education today with new models like blended learning, programs with longer school days, and non-traditional teacher compensation policies.  And while we hear of many schools’ successes under these new and different models, we also hear of atrocious school failures.  There are many claims, some valid, that failing schools are not held accountable; some point to the system-wide failure of sponsors.

What legislators in those early years didn’t consider fully was the other half of the charter bargain: accountability.  Maybe it was the “Minnesota nice” in them (a term of endearment from a fellow Minnesotan). Maybe it was the opinion that all students were above average.  Or maybe it was just too early in the evolution of charter schools to understand how the charter model, that looked great on paper, would develop in the real world.  As the charter school law was adapted and adopted across the country over the last 20 years, these entities that support, cheerlead, and fist-pump charter schools morphed into “authorizers.”  With a new name came renewed focus on the charter bargain.  The term “authorizer” is more consistent with the legal obligations assigned to them.  Authorizers approve schools, evaluate them, and determine whether they should continue to serve students or close.

Many states still use the term “sponsor” to describe the entity that holds schools accountable, but more and more states are choosing to use “authorizer” to describe this accountability mechanism.  In the places where sponsors hold charter schools accountable, they often also must provide services inconsistent with these legally-assigned duties.  Some states still require sponsors to provide technical assistance to charter schools, creating a problematic conflict for the sponsor when it has to evaluate the school.  As charter schools evolve into the next twenty years, we expect to see clearer and more aligned understanding of the role of the authorizer in both defining autonomies and holding schools accountable.

We are awaiting the final approval by the governors of Indiana and Florida to important changes to their charter laws.  In Texas—home to 10% of the nation’s charter schools—a bill making its way through the legislature has the opportunity for significant impact on the quality of the state’s portfolio of charters. Nevada and South Carolina are both considering bills that advance an approach to authorizing that reflects NACSA’s significant work in the area of performance management for charter schools. And in North Carolina, the Senate passed a bill (SB 337) that would create a new independent commission to oversee charter schools in the state.  Unfortunately it lacks some basic quality control provisions for the authorizer and the charter sector.

As we said at the top: a whirlwind. There is a growing appetite for good authorizing and NACSA is encouraged to see this level of thoughtful discourse in statehouses across the country. With proposals still expected to see action this year in New Jersey and Delaware, this is just the start.   Read more here.

NECSN joins other charter associations like the California Charter Schools Association that have made a commitment to quality and accountability even if it means calling for the closure of their own members. These leading associations recognize that failing charter schools are a threat to all those that are succeeding.

Phillips piece is also important because it demonstrates how components of the charter school accountability ecosystem other than authorizers–in this case, a regional charter school support organization–can help to hold authorizers accountable for how the quality of their own performance impacts the likelihood that a failing school faces consequences for its failure.

Phillips applauds the New York State Board of Regents for making “a painful but correct” decision to close a failing charter and for demonstrating that they “care more about

academic results than regulatory compliance.” At the same time, though, he argues that the Regents could make accountability more likely by making it more fair and predictable. Phillips argues that clear renewal ground rules and consistent feedback could help keep closure fights out of the courts and minimize the ability of low-performing schools to defend themselves with attacks on the process. He encourages the regents to “consider copying the approach used with the State University and UFT Charter School in Brooklyn” where “as part of a multi-year renewal, SUNY told the school precisely how many academic measures it had to meet in order to apply for its next contract. If the school falls short, it automatically closes.” He says “this is fairer to both parties” and will result in a better process overall.

It is this kind of courageous call for quality and accountability that is at the heart of NACSA’s One Million Lives campaign.

We’re encouraged that lawmakers are agreeing, and creating chartering commissions in such relatively conservative states as Georgia and Mississippi and such relatively liberal states as Washington and Hawaii.

Despite years of evidence to the contrary, a small number of charter school advocates still support having dozens of different charter school authorizing organizations in a state.  They argue for quantity in hopes that it will lead to quality.

But the evidence is exactly the opposite. In Ohio and Minnesota, we have seen that the existence of dozens of authorizers creates a race to the bottom.  Weak charter school applicants shop around for the authorizer with the lowest standards and easiest review processes.  Failing schools that are closed by an authorizer with high standards can simply go to another, less-discriminating authorizer that allows them to re-open.

After years of frustration with too many authorizers and too many failing charter schools, charter school advocates in both Minnesota and Ohio passed strong new laws to reduce the number of authorizers in each state.

NACSA supports the creation of statewide charter school commissions because they can develop expertise and capacity to establish appropriate standards for approval and renewal, while maintaining their independence from traditional school district and state education department politics and regulations.

We held our annual joint meeting of our Board of Directors and National Advisory Board in the French Quarter and, despite the festive surroundings, had a number of serious and enlightening discussions.  In a dinner discussion that included a number of New Orleans education leaders, people were passionate both about the tremendous education successes in New Orleans, spurred in part by strong accountability, and the fact that the new and improved system is still not succeeding with all students.  The charter school idea is powerful because it supports both accountability and differentiation.  But some felt that standardization was causing us to lose some kids.  Others pointed out that New Orleans is succeeding with more kids than ever before.  Can we develop greater differentiation in this new system while maintaining high standards?  Or is our drive toward higher standards producing homogeneity that leaves some kids behind? Do we reach those kids by holding firm or by differentiating?  Is there a third way?

This tension between homogeneity and differentiation also appeared in discussions about admissions, discipline and expulsion.  Participants in the suspension/expulsion discussion group feared that some charter schools are violating students’ rights.  But other participants in the same group warned that the potential solutions to this problem would lead to “miasmic sameness” among schools.  They argued that we need to protect charter schools’ ability to be maintain their own culture, including discipline.  In fact, some observed that the common enrollment systems being discussed by another group, while potentially solving problems in admissions, might lead to even more students being enrolled in schools in which the student or his family is not familiar with or supportive of the culture of the school.

Differentiation was again a theme in conversations about authorizers.  Many people identified a variety of types of strong authorizing practices, including authorizers that have:

• the ability to evaluate, not just proposals for individual schools, but to evaluate network growth plans;
• access to data about student admissions, suspensions and expulsions; and
• the expertise to evaluate innovative models (e.g. blended learning, alternative schools) and the capacity to develop performance measures that can assess how well those schools are working.

While we would all prefer to have all authorizers be good at everything, this is not likely in a world of 1000 authorizers, most of whom have one charter school.  One way NACSA is dealing with this challenge is the promotion of statewide independent charter boards that develop scale and expertise.  Another idea that was discussed at our meeting is the potential for authorizers to voluntarily develop networks and expertise around certain topics (such as replication, blended learning, and alternative education).

The charter idea is powerful because it incorporates both high standards and differentiation.  We have been working to find the right balance between these forces for twenty years.  If we continue to recognize, respect and build upon the virtues of each, the charter school community will continue to get stronger.

A breakthrough happened in 2004, when Louisiana created its Recovery School District (PDF), able to take over schools (not districts) and either run them directly or charter them. The RSD’s success (which I’m happy to debate with the chronic skeptics) has so far inspired three other states to create full-scale recovery districts with similar intervention powers (Tennessee and Michigan, both underway, and Virginia, due to start next year). Texas has a strong recovery-district bill now moving through its legislature; and a half-dozen states have created “RSD-Lite” knockoffs that provide new resources but no change in district governance.

The good folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute asked me to look at these innovations, and this week published  Redefining the School District in Tennessee, my take on the Volunteer State’s Achievement School District. It’s partly an attempt to describe the nuts and bolts — how they do finance and services and teacher recruitment — but also to convey the flavor of this enterprise under the galvanic leadership of Chris Barbic, who took on the ASD after a decade spent founding and running Houston’s Broad-Prize-winning Yes Prep.  He and his team are not only setting serious stretch goals — moving bottom-5% schools into the top 25% of proficiency statewide — but getting there by attending to “hearts and minds” as well as classroom practice.

Read some coverage and reactions to report here, here and here.

Lots of lessons to learn, lots to argue about… have at it!

Certain findings deserve particular attention:

• More of the nation’s authorizers are implementing NACSA’s “essential practices” for authorizing.  This is a great sign of a maturing sector.
• Among authorizer types, newly-established Independent Chartering Boards (ICBs)—a small but growing group—are most likely to have essential practices in place.  This finding reinforces our desire to have more states establish ICBs.
• Small authorizers with portfolios of fewer than 10 schools have the least desirable practices across the board.  This is not a new finding and doesn’t change year-to-year.  With growth comes the infrastructure to do the work.
• The charter school closure rate in renewal, after two years of decline, increased from 6.2 percent in 2010–11 to 12.9 percent in 2011–12. Yet as authorizers close failing schools, they must work to replace those schools with many more excellent schools.  Two-thirds of large authorizers have policies in place to promote replication while still too few (23%) of small authorizers are engaged in this practice.

These are crucial data points. We know charter schools provide outstanding educational options to tens of thousands of children. We launched our One Million Lives campaign to give one million more children the chance to attend great schools.

This data suggests a positive trend, but we have a long way to go.  We hope our report provides some insight into what we are doing well and what we could do better.  We welcome your contributions to this effort. We hope the information compiled in this report is one resource to guide us all on this path.