Public Impact has authored a report for NACSA and the Charter School Growth Fund with ten policy recommendations to foster accelerated growth of successful charter schools and school networks. Two themes emerge. The first: Taking a differentiated approach to key aspects of charter-school-authorizing work—school accountability frameworks, school replication, and school renewal—is important. Here, differentiation also means treating high-performing charters differently than others; options include green-lighting multiple schools over several years contingent on the performance of their predecessors and using shorter applications tailored to existing schools, capitalizing on the quantitative and qualitative data that an authorizing office has already collected as part of its oversight duties. The second: State policy must complement those efforts. Recommendations include crafting legislation that builds a statewide community of authorizers committed to scaling quality (e.g., establishing standards for authorizer quality and encouraging school districts to embrace a portfolio management approach); removing or tweaking state caps on charter schools so that only high performers may grow (and, conversely, adopting mandatory closure laws, as we have in Ohio, for perennial low performers); providing capital for incubation and acceleration efforts; being open to school-governance models that support inter and intra-state networks of schools; and integrating a “restart strategy” (i.e., transitioning the charter of a low-performing charter school to a new board and management team). To which we say, bring it on!
SOURCE: Public Impact, Replicating Quality: Policy Recommendations to Support the Replication and Growth of High-Performing Charter Schools and Networks (Chicago: National Association of Charter School Authorizers and Public Impact, January 2014).
