The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) has emerged as one of the nation’s staunchest proponents of charter-school quality. In November 2012, it launched its ambitious One Million Lives campaign, the purpose of which is “to bend the quality curve upward.” Among the key strategies to improve quality, while maintaining growth, is to close as many as a thousand low-performing charter schools and to open two thousand high-performing ones. Under the closure-replication strategy, NACSA calculates that one million additional children will enroll in a high-performing school by 2018. In the Year One update, NACSA reports that the campaign is off to a strong start. The upshot: as a result of proactive authorizing practices, 491 promising, new charter schools have opened, while 206 failing schools closed in 2013. These actions affected roughly 232,000 students. The report dishes other morsels of information regarding progress in strengthening accountability, including changes to state law and the commitment from more authorizers to adhere to NACSA’s essential practices. The charter-school sector’s commitment to quality is impressive; if only that could be said about traditional public schools, too.
SOURCE: National Association of Charter School Authorizers, One Million Lives, Year One (Chicago: Author, 2014).
