Dr. Charisse Gulosino

Visiting Scholar, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis, Columbia University Teachers College;  Affiliate Research Faculty Member, Loyola Institute for Quality and Equity in Education, Loyola University New Orleans

In this article I will discuss the impact of founders on the governance of charter schools. Preliminarily, let me give you a simple example of a common scenario that could play out in organizational governance, whether for-profit or non-profit. Organization X had been established largely through the commitment and efforts of a founder director. As the years pass, out of respect and esteem, it is hard for the governing board of organization X not to defer to the founder's judgment, even though formally the founder is now just another board director. The corporate and nonprofit worlds contain similar examples of this scenario which has been dubbed "founder's syndrome" or "founderitis" in both practitioner and academic circles (Linnell, 2004). The role that prominent founders such as Steve Jobs (Apple Inc), Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation), Jerry Sandusky (Second Mile Foundation), Paul Bin`der (Big Apple Circus) and Geoffrey Canada (Harlem Children's Zone) play in influencing organizational outcomes (both good and bad) has gained popular media attention (Chiu, 2011; McRay, 2010; Whittemore, 2009; Schwartz, 2009; Collins, 2008).

There is a dearth of empirical research to support (or refute) the positive impact of founders on charter school boards. Generally, charter school boards are comprised of teachers, parents, school administrators, community leaders and residents, and business executives who are initially recruited by school founders based on their willingness to provide resources, expertise, time and connections that are beneficial to the school. The details of charter school creation, from pre-charter to pre-operational, fall to the school's founder. While state laws are silent on who can and cannot become a charter school founder and on the length of board tenure, there is no shortage of advice on effective governance and oversight of charter schools (Cornell-Feist, 2007; Gewertz, 2008). Little attention, however, has been given to empirically test for the influence of a founder on the charter school after start-up.

Following a review of the extant literature on both the non-profit and corporate sectors, I have summarized some of the studies pertaining to founders.

- Entrenchment theory - Corporate governance research on the effects of founders on operating and accounting performances have produced mixed findings (Morck, Shleifer & Vishny, 1989). The founders’ long involvement in the creation and management of the organization indicate stronger insider commitment and are less likely to be removed from the board.

- Entrepreneurial growth - Gedajlovic et al. (2004) and Willard & Krueger (1992) cite the entrepreneurship literature to argue that there is a threshold point in the development of entrepreneurial organizations where decision-making capabilities of founders are no longer sufficient to meet the organization's oversight needs. Thus, once threshold is reached founders should step down and relinquish oversight/monitoring function to non-founders.

- Biological life cycle - Comparing entrepreneurial growth to a biological life cycle (Hofer & Charan, 1984, Churchill & Lewis, 1983; Greiner, 1972), theorists have viewed organizations as progressing through several developmental changes (from startup to maturity), and have adopted this perspective to evaluate the founder's ongoing utility to the organization.  Thus, to the degree that a founder fails to manage transitions and to adapt to evolving needs, their utility should be negatively related to organizational performance. Hambrick and Crozier (1985) found that organizations successfully evolving from a startup to an established organization had added nonfounding board members, whereas organizations that had left their founding board in place had a greater difficulty managing transitions. As Stevenson and Jarillio (1990) and Daily and Dalton (1992) have observed, the transition from the startup stage to a growth stage almost inevitably occurs as the organization outgrows the skill sets and expertise of the founder.

In summary, the existing research on founders has been acknowledged in the literature on non-profit and corporate governance, suggesting the interplay between the evolving organization and the focus on the governance role played by the founder. However, an empirical investigation into the relationship between a charter school's performance and the presence of founder-directors does not exist. The extent to which "founder's syndrome" impacts the performance accountability (also known as results-accountability or outcomes-based accountability) of charter schools is largely unknown. Charter school board experts frequently rely on anecdotal evidence, rather than data from carefully designed research studies, to support their conclusions.

My co-author Dr. Elif Sisli Ciamarra, a Brandeis University finance professor, and I address this gap in the literature by examining the effects founders have on charter school performance in Massachusetts. Massachusetts provides an appropriate place of study due to the accountability mechanisms that authorizers require for the approval or renewal of charters. Charter schools, through their governing boards, are held accountable via annual reports, audited and unaudited financial statements, and site evaluation visits, and are required to file for renewal every five years. Using a large, hand-collected data set of financial statements, student achievement, and board composition variables over a nine year period, we examine whether the presence of a founder on the charter's governing board is associated with higher school performance. We measure school performance separately by financial outcomes that are intended to be equivalent to both operational efficiency and student achievement. Where appropriate, our estimation strategy takes into account that there may be self selection of founders onto charter school boards. That is to say, charter school boards with and without founders are different in ways that can bias results. In order to account for this problem, we use the average treatment effect (ATE) methodology for a bias-correction in the estimation. We find a negative impact of founders on both financial and academic performance, consistent with empirical predictions implied by the entrenchment, entrepreneurial growth and life cycle theories (Note: results are available upon request).

Source: Gulosino, C. & Sisli Ciamarra, E. (2011). Founders and financially affiliated directors on charter school boards and their impact on financial performance and academic achievement. Paper presented at the 2011 International Symposium on the Economics of Education. Hong Kong, Dec. 17-18, 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract= 2008811 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.2008811

In addition, the descriptive summary shown in Table 1 shows that the representation of founders on the boards has steeply declined from 2.87 in 2001 to 1.34 in 2009, constituting 90 percent in 2001 to 60 percent in 2009 of boards with at least one founder. On the whole, the results reveal that founder-directors are certainly involved in the early operational stages of charter schools, but their lingering presence can weaken charter school performance. A scenario such as this highlights a board’s need to always be alert to the early signals of founder's syndrome — so that a transition can be made while founders lessen their roles in later years.

Our study of board composition and effective charter school governance found significant guidance from a growing body of literature on corporate and nonprofit boards. This type of study should be broadened to include as many states and charter schools as possible to complement and verify the findings. Future research is needed to examine the skill sets of founder board members that are conducive to charter school sustainability and success, since charter schools are an increasingly common educational governance reform. 

References

Churchill, N.C., & Lewis, V.L. (1983). Growing concerns: The five stages of small business growth. Harvard Business Review, 7(3), 30-50.

Chiu, L. (2011, November 17). Lessons from the Second Mile scandal for nonprofits and their boards. The Chronicle of Philanthropy.  Retrieved from http://philanthropy.com/article/Lessons-From-the-Second-Mile/129849/ 

Collins, G. (2008, October 21). Goodbye greasepaint: Veteran showman exits the tent. New York Times.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/theater/22ring.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=nonprofit&st=cse&oref=slogin

Cornell-Feist, M. (2007). Good to govern: Evaluating the capacity of charter school founding boards. NACSA Authorizer Issue Brief, 15.  Retrieved from http://charterschooltools.org/tools/GoodToGovern.pdf

Daily, C., & Dalton, D. (1992). Financial performance of founder-managed versus professionally managed small corporations. Journal of Small Business Management, 30 (2), 25–34.

Gedajlovic, E., Lubatkin, M., & Schulze,W. (2004). Crossing the threshold from founder management to professional management: A governance perspective. Journal of Management Studies, 41 (5), 899–912.

Gewertz, C. (2008, September 8). Many charter boards seen as unprepared. Retrieved from Education Week website, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/09/10/03wallace-6.h28.html

Greiner, L.E. (1972). Evolution and revolution as organizations grow. Harvard Business Review, 50(4): 37-46.

Hofer, C. W., & Charan, R. (1984). The transition to professional management: Mission impossible? American Journal of Small Business, 9, 1-11.

Linnell, D. (2004).  Founders and Other Gods. Nonprofit Quarterly, 11, 1.

McRay, G. (2010, January 12).  Avoiding 501(c)(3) Founder's syndrome.  Retrieved from Foundation Group website, http://www.501c3.org/blog/avoiding-501c3-founders-syndrome/

Morck, R.A., Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. (1989). Alternative mechanisms for corporate control. American Economic Review, 79, 842-852. 

Schwartz, R. (2009, July).  The charismatic entrepreneur.  Retrieved from Social Edge website, http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/social-entrepreneurship/the-charismatic-entrepreneur

Stevenson, H.H., & Jarillo, J.C. (1990). A paradigm of entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial management. Strategic Management Journal, 11, Summer, Special Issue, 17-27.

Whittemore, N. (2009, January 17).  Founder's syndrome.  Retrieved from Startup Life website, http://news.change.org/stories/founders-syndrome

Willard, G.E., & Krueger, D. (1992). In order to grow, must the founder and non-founder managed high-growth manufacturing firms. Journal of Business Venturing, 7, 181-194.

________. (2009, September 14).  Founder's syndrome- When to step down. Retrieved from Under 30 CEO website, http://under30ceo.com/founder%E2%80%99s-syndrome-when-to-step-down/

________. (2011, May 28).  The board just fired me... and I'm the founder! Retrieved from Blue Avocado website, http://www.blueavocado.org/content/board-just-fired-me-and-im-founder?page=1

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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By Lisa DiGaudio, Founding Principal of New Dawn Charter School

To implement the Common Core, you need to think in terms of 12 “shifts” that need to be made—6 in math and 6 in English language arts. In this blog entry, I’m going to focus on Common Core Shift 2: Knowledge in the Disciplines for Grades 6-12.

Okay content area teachers, take a few deep breathes. Shift Two is not as bad as you think it is (and yes, Math teachers, that includes you too!). The goal is to have students reading and using what they have read in their discussions and writing assignments. Essentially it is a more aggressive push at showing evidence. Instead of saving this skill for writing assignments, students have to use it all of the time in the classroom. I wanted to give a few ideas on what this would look like and how it can be done. In an earlier blog I talked about “themes” for the whole building to work on, and used The Hunger Games as an example. This can certainly be done on some level at certain times during the year, but in reality, you’re all responsible for tests here. Getting results is the bottom line, and planning to use curriculum within this shift to yield results can seem daunting, especially for a new teacher.

So let’s start with Math. If you log into the EngageNY site (www.engageny.org), you’ll see that New York State gives you a few lovely exemplars to consider implementing at specific levels. It’s a great sample of units, but you’re not going to see much literature from it. In fact the resources mainly  direct you to your SMARTboard resources--that is, if you have one in your room. This is about literacy. If you’re teaching your students about polynomials, then what literature, outside of the textbook, would you introduce? Well there are a few places to go. First, particularly if you are a middle school teacher, you can go to Scholastic and look at the resources for MATH magazine. Not only do they have age appropriate articles and scenarios for the students to read, but they also include the CALCULIT section, which gives you fiction and nonfiction books to introduce to your students when teaching a unit.

For high school teachers, you have a little more clicking of the mouse to do. Amazon offered several different titles on how to teach polynomials, and books for students to read. Articles from magazines that could help produce mathematical scenarios would probably work best. At the Network Team Institute in Albany in November, we learned in math how to take a question from the concrete to the abstract. We worked formulas based on the information provided, and as the scenario got more difficult, there was less information to call upon for reference. This would be a good place to start with high school students. The scaffolding for the students having a hard time, to the students who need to be challenged, can be easily situated when you plan ahead.

The thing is this: whether it is math, science, social studies or any other elective, you want to start thinking about how you are going to introduce literature. A small passage may be a great opener, reading a paragraph and then reading related materials for homework, along with the mechanical elements (such as math problems or science labs). The key is shifting the balance to more and more informational text, and using it as the central focal point to what you are teaching. If you are teaching about the Civil War, then what piece of informational text best exemplifies the complexities of the war and Lincoln’s position about secession? What fictional texts could be used to support these big ideas? How can students reference these works in their conversations with you and with peers? How can they reference these works in their writing? By shaping out the scope of use for literature, we gain a better picture of how to implement the big ideas, scaffold for acquisition level and then move to deeper places, where the pieces will continue to resonate with students.

Our high school students do have to become better at referencing materials they are working with. Getting in the habit of citing informational text during conversations with peers and teachers, and in their writing assignments, will build analytical skills that will carry through for college. The ability to use many resources as a backup to original thoughts is important. As a freshman in college, I struggled with recalling information to defend my stance on things. I got better as the semester wore on, but it took a lot of reading, and a lot of arguing with my professor, to get in the habit of referencing text to back up my views. One of my professors back then used to say, “who are you and why are you an expert”? It angered me then, but it was true. Students at that age aren’t creating new information, they are agreeing or disagreeing with it, and “because I said so” doesn’t really pass muster for an argument. They need to use relevant works that support their claims, and that ability is what builds skills in analysis, synthesis and ultimately, ownership of the concepts.

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Dr. Charisse Gulosino

This week, the 37th Annual Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) Conference will be held in Boston from March 15-17, 2012.  The membership of AEFP consists of scholars and scholar-practitioners who frequently testify before state legislatures and the federal government on issues of education finance.  Below, I have listed a promising session about a topic frequently discussed on the NICS’s blog – that is, the issue of principal accountability.  The session will specifically address the following key questions:  What are some measurement approaches (test-score based and non-test-based measures) to evaluate principal performance? What are the different approaches to measuring principal’s contribution to school effectiveness?  What key dimensions of instructional leadership behaviors and overall leadership traits are important contributors to principal effectiveness?  From the point of view of the school principal whose hiring, assignment, promotion, tenure and dismissal, and compensation may depend on the measurement approaches and behavior dimensions chosen, seeking definitive answers to these testable questions is critical. 

Join renowned scholars and authors as they discuss the findings for measuring principal performance.  The results of the empirical research papers are relevant to practitioners and policymakers working to improve district principal evaluation systems.  Professor Roger Goddard and I will serve as the session discussants.

8.11 - The Buck Stops Here: Measuring Principal Performance in an Accountability Context

Room: Dedham, 4th Floor

Chair: Katina R. Stapleton, National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Ellen Goldring, Vanderbilt University. The Convergent and Divergent Validity of the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VALED) : Instructional Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. (Co-author: Xiu Cravens, Vanderbilt University, Andrew Porter, University of Pennsylvania)

Carolyn Kelley, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Design and Validation of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) Formative School Leader Assessment. (Co-author: Richard Halverson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Eric Camburn, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Anthony T. Milanowski, Westat. The Relationship Between Standards-Based Principal Performance Evaluation Ratings and School Value-added: Evidence from Two Districts. (Co-author: Steven M. Kimball, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Jason A. Grissom, Vanderbilt University. Evaluating the Challenges of Using Student Test Scores to Measure Principal Performance. (Co-author: Susanna Loeb, Stanford University, Demetra Kalogrides, Stanford University)

Discussant’s: Roger Goddard, Texas A&M University. Charrise Gulosino, Columbia University, Teachers College

For more information on AEFP’s conference in Boston and the venue, follow this link. http://www.aefpweb.org/annualconference/registration

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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By Lisa DiGaudio, Founding Principal of New Dawn Charter School

To implement the Common Core, you need to think in terms of 12 “shifts” that need to be made—6 in math and 6 in English language arts. In this blog entry, I’m going to focus on Common Core Shift 1: Balancing Informational and Literary Texts as it pertains to math.

Whether we are in a content area in the middle or high school, or in elementary school, the shudders I have seen teachers make regarding Common Core and Math has been a regular occurrence in the last year. The first instructional shift in math (FOCUS) is to gain deep understanding of concepts in different grade levels, so that when we get to shift 2, Coherence, there is a natural transition of skills that students can complete from one grade to the next. By doing so, students will listen, speak, read and discuss their understandings with their peers and teachers (remind you of anything?).

It’s no surprise that Common Core wants our children interacting with numbers in the same way that we want them to interact with literature--informational or fiction. By increasing the level of discourse our students have with numbers and number concepts, as they progress to more abstract concepts, they retain the skill and apply it to new concepts in later years. Just before the winter holidays I was coaching a Kindergarten team at my school on shapes. It was a perfect time for teaching shapes to Kindergarteners because I was able to use so many different materials like dreidles, trees, lights, ornaments, candles, etc., in the classroom to show the class that shapes are all around. Starting with the concrete begins a foundation of learning that students will be able to use as they move on in their understanding of geometry. We started our lesson on shapes by learning a “juicy” word: attributes (noun). We wrote it down on chart paper, and the teacher and I began to describe our basic characteristics. From there, we held up different objects in the classroom for the students to identify and then describe with that object’s attributes. Throughout the week the students worked on different sorting activities based on a shape’s attribute, read The Shape of Things by Dayle Anne Dodds, and learned other juicy words like parallel and perpendicular.

By the end of the week, the class was busy identifying the attributes of shapes all over the school, sorting them according to the number of sides they had, comparing and contrasting squares and rectangles, and putting triangles together to make new shapes, like diamonds and squares. If we look at the focus that is recommended in the Common Core for Kindergarten through second grade, we see that fluency with numbers, adding and subtracting, is key. As the students identify shapes and their attributes, they can continue their relationship with numbers by counting sides, sorting shapes and then move on to more abstract concepts like, “What happens to a square when you take one of its sides away?”

In grades 3-5, Common Core dictates that the focus moves to multiplication and division. I loved teaching the algorithms for problem solving, because it offered so many alternatives for my students. We used to have Lattice Method wars, seeing who can solve a long multiplication problem the fastest using lattice. (I’m a huge fan of this method, especially for my kids who have a hard time with the conventional method and remembering multiplication facts beyond single digit numbers.) In these grades, thematic teaching can also be introduced, with full units aligning to each content area. For example, in third grade, where world communities is the focus of instruction, a thematic unit on Rome can have students learning how to estimate how many bricks it took to build the Colisseum. There are great resources out there that can help you develop these problems (such as the NOVA classroom, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/colosseum/qanda/) and build them out to other content areas. The games, the politics of the time, climate, and foods cover the math focus, enable us to look at an even distribution of fiction and informational text (and also great scenes to show from the movie Gladiator).

In grade 6, ratios, expressions, equations and proportional reasoning are the focus. Remember when I talked about the fabulous presentation I saw given on Common Core Math at the Network Team Institute in Albany? Well this is perfect here, going from the concrete to the abstract. We were all presented with a simple problem and we needed to figure out the answer. Thematic units can be used here too. One of my favorite units to teach, using figurative language, was on Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Since we were practicing our listening skills for the ELA exam, I always made sure I had a read aloud each month for the classes. Instead of formal notes, I asked the class to keep a journal of the pictures in their mind as I read the story to them. These journals would then be evidence for a later assignment that they would work on at the end of the story. After I read them Hatchet, we watched the movie Cast Away, with Tom Hanks. Aside from the settings (I’ll get to that in a second for this theme unit), the book and movie correlate perfectly, right down to the decisions regarding possible suicide or carrying on in the hopes that salvation would come. Now for a theme unit, a comparison of average temperatures of the movie and book, plus rates of survival in “real life” can be a component of the overall project, including the effects of the diets the characters maintained while marooned.

I want to go back to algorithms for a quick moment, as it is vital to give every student a chance to problem solve in their own way by reviewing the steps they took and focusing on each step made towards a solution. By approaching expressions, equations and ratios in this way, students will also see how they relate to basic number sense.

In grades 7 and 8, as our students are getting ready for Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus, they will focus more deeply on ratios, proportions and expressions. Learning how to problem solve culminates with interaction of the “unknown”, that missing number or missing component of a problem that will lead to larger unknowns as the students enter high school math. Grades K-8 embody the building blocks of number competency, moving from the concrete to solving for the unknown. The math portions here will gain strength by incorporating fiction and nonfiction texts to support the concepts and help students grasp the concrete.

I’m going to cite Scholastic.com again, because it does indeed have a plethora of materials, including printables and short movies that will correlate to just about any math topic you have. It’s funny. I never believed in myself as a math person. When I took the CLEP exam for my Elementary Education certification, I thought I would die trying to get through the test preparation book. While I passed the CLEP with flying colors, my ongoing insecurity about my math abilities led me to not take risks when I taught math. Sitting in the Network Institute session with Andrew Chen was a real treat. In just four hours, he had me believing in my math abilities once again. Andrew didn’t wave a magic wand either. He just cultivated our self-belief that we could indeed come up with a solution on our own given the facts.

So, by learning to make Shift 1 for the Common Core in math, I learned the lesson at the heart of this first shift: When it comes to instructional focus, regardless of the grade level, we must realign ourselves to sticking to the facts, and helping our kids get comfortable working with them.

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By Tovah Gottesman and Kelsey Boivin, The Finance Project

Technology permeates our daily lives. Everywhere we turn there is some new gadget on the market or a new application available for download. More importantly, these devices and software are revolutionizing how students are taught in schools and homes. As educators, it is impossible to avoid engaging with the digital age. Today’s children are adept users of technology, and many are more technologically literate than their parents and teachers.

At the local, state, and national levels, schools actively seek effective strategies for incorporating technology into the classroom. States are pushing policies to give students more access to digital learning and online classes. More schools are applying for the federal government’s E-Rate program  that subsidizes school and library technology purchases. The recent announcement of the second round grantee winners for the federal Investing in Innovation (I3) contest is a reminder of the growing emphasis on revamping the ways in which children are educated.

To help America remain the top economic and technological leader of the global marketplace, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education is a top priority on the public education agenda. Rather than fight the inevitable, many teachers, principals, and researchers have decided to embrace recent technology to enhance instruction, engage students, and meet today’s educational challenges. As iPads replace textbooks and SMART Boards replace chalkboards, technology is reinvigorating the classroom experience.

While school leaders should not let their fears or uncertainties about technology prevent them from integrating technology into the classroom, technology plans must address concerns among teachers, parents, and school boards regarding students’ possible misuse of technology and access to unreliable and inappropriate information.  School leaders need to create plans that address use, misuse, security and privacy issues as well as a technology code of conduct agreement for both students and teachers.

It is important that independent charter schools keep abreast of technological advances and work to create more technologically friendly classrooms. It is also critical to involve teachers, parents, community members, and students in selecting the new technology for their schools

When creating a yearly budget, it is important to consider technology expenses and to plan for new purchases, investments, and professional development for teachers. Leaders should plan for multiple types of investment, including hardware as well as service and support contracts, replacement and update costs, software, and site licenses. Yet we all know that in reality, school budgets never have enough to go around.  Therefore, to build a technologically supportive environment, school leaders often have to find other sources of funding. Several grants are available to charter schools at the national, rural, and local levels that support the incorporation of technology in schools. In addition, corporations and organizations such as Intel, eSchool News, and Edutopia offer funding resources and guidance.

Several studies have found that implementing technology within classrooms leads to increases in learning by students. However, as any cautious school leader or teacher will tell say, technology alone will not improve learning. It is, in fact, when technology is used to enhance instruction, to deepen learning, and to broaden understanding that greater learning happens. In other words, curricula must drive technology, not the other way around. A simple one-size fits all plan will not do. With this in mind, school administrators need to identify instructional and student needs first  and, then through thoughtful planning, integrate technology in a manner that will support learning and instruction.

School administrators who develop a culture that embraces technology for its positive potential ensure successful and seamless integration. Studies show that the commitment and interest of the principal is crucial if teachers are to play an active role in technology integration. It is important to recognize that not all teachers may be motivated to use technology. Further, teachers may push back against plans that they perceive to be rigid and heavy-handed.               

The simple presence of technology is not enough to ensure its effective use. Teachers and other school employees must know how to weave technology into their lesson plans and daily instruction. Several online resources offer pre-written lesson plans and power point presentations, as well as tutorials for including different technologies within the classroom. Others provide general support, ideas for the use of specific types of technology for reaching specific teaching goals, and access to a host of other resources for teachers interested in building their technological repertoire. Most importantly, school administrators must provide teachers ample time to conceptualize, explore, and practice using new technology in their teaching plans.

Formative and summative evaluations are an essential element in supporting the integration of technology into teaching. The dialogue about and design of the evaluation module should begin when the technology program is in its infancy stage and continue throughout (and beyond) program implementation. Key stakeholders, including teachers, should play an integral role in the creation and monitoring of the strategic evaluation plan. Once implemented, charter school leaders should take time to monitor and evaluate the impact of the technology on instruction and learning. By doing so, school leaders will have the information necessary to help secure and maintain current or future funding for technology.

Technology is changing the way we think about educating students. Cost is an obstacle for many public schools; however, charter school leaders cannot ignore the value that technology may bring to the table. It gives teachers the ability to reach different types of learners and personalize instruction.

Before investing in classroom technology, charter school leaders and teachers need to devote time to assessing the school’s needs for technology and creating a comprehensive integration plan. One helpful tool is EdTech Locator. Lastly, many charter school educators find it helpful to participate in the nationwide Digital Learning Day on February 1^st.

What steps has your school taken to integrate technology into the curriculum? We invite you to share your experience and thoughts with us.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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By Tovah Gottesman, The Finance Project

Schools are increasingly using data to guide decision-making, increase student achievement for all, and close learning gaps. As principals and teachers become more adept at converting the data into workable information, transforming that information into knowledge remains a big hurdle for many schools. In short, schools need to be careful of becoming “data-rich but information poor.” Teachers need to be able to use the data to inform and improve their instructional practice. Administrators can use data to evaluate teachers or school programming. Ultimately, administrators and teachers can leverage the knowledge gleaned from the data as the basis for action.

This Voice from the Field blog post features an independent charter school leveraging their data to improve instructional and institutional practice.

E.L. Haynes Public Charter School’s mission is that every student of every race, socioeconomic status, and home language will reach high levels of academic achievement and be prepared to succeed at the college of his or her choice. In 2004, E.L. Haynes started with 120 students, in a space above a CVS in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington D.C. They have now grown to 2 campuses and over 700 students. In 2011-2012, E.L. Haynes will serve 800 students in grades pre-school through nine and will grow, adding a grade each year until it serves students in grades pre-school through 12. E.L. Haynes is the first year-round public school in Washington, DC. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, E.L. Haynes was named a Silver Award winning school in the New Leaders for New Schools’ Effective Practice grant program, ranking as a top school among a consortium of 144 charter schools nationwide. 

I spoke with the Data Coordinator for both campuses, Tammy Tuck, about developing a school-wide data-driven culture and transforming that data into usable knowledge for the administrators and teachers. Recognized for their focus on creating a data-driven school, E.L. Haynes received a grant to collaborate with two other D.C. public schools on a project called the Power of Planning, that focuses on data-driven instruction and standards based planning. The website is still growing, but will provide schools access to a variety of tools, videos, protocols, and information resources.

What is your school’s data initiative?

(TT): We collect data at the student and school level. With help from the Achievement Network, we use interim assessments, given every four to six weeks, to track students’ progress throughout the year. The tracking enables us to better prepare our students for the standardized tests in the spring. The interim tests help teachers identify which students need further assistance and course correct through the school year. The cycle of interims helps teachers modify and improve their instructional planning model.

How was your experience getting teachers behind this move to data-driven instruction?

(TT): It was not difficult to garner teacher buy in for using data to inform their practices. The school leadership purposefully uses research-based best practices to help teachers see the potential of using data-driven instruction. For new staff, we only hire teachers that demonstrate a commitment to our school’s mission. We use case studies with the newer staff to help them understand how and why data-driven instruction works.

How has student achievement progressed over the years? Has it informed your data collection and instruction?

(TT): Currently, we are trying to problem solve how we can improve our student’s test scores so that they move up to the next level. We had a steep climb up to the mid 60s, but then we hit a plateau. We are working on our curriculum development and trying to identify which subgroups are underperforming and what we can do to meet their needs.

Do you look to other charter schools’ practices to help you identify what you can do to move your students to the next level?

(TT): Yes, we collaborate a lot with other schools and individuals. Paul Bambrick is an excellent resource because he has written a lot about data-driven schools and we collaborate with his North Star Academy schools in New Jersey. In addition, Doug Reeves of The Leadership and Learning Center is a great resource for creating data teams.

E.L. Haynes is a pre-K-9th charter school; do you track your students through their entire learning career?

(TT): We are able to collect student level data for grade levels two through nine. This year we began a pilot interim assessment for our second graders. The D.C. standards made it difficult to track students from year to year; however, the Common Core curriculum will make it easier to follow students throughout their time at E.L. Haynes.

Teachers meet with their students’ future teachers to share information about each student and groups of students’ academic performance. It is our goal to gather longitudinal data on our student’s progress. To help with the longitudinal data collection, we are developing a new data platform.

What is the new data platform? Did you collaborate with a company to help you develop the platform?

 (TT): With the help of a business-consulting firm, Acumen Solutions, we developed Student Force, built on the infrastructure of Sales Force. Currently, we are in the pilot year, and because we are using it as our entire information system, we have had some successes and challenges. Over the next year, we expect there to be some enhancements and new releases with the platform that will help us move toward a higher level of sophistication with our data.

You mentioned there were two-levels to your data collection, what is the second?

(TT): We also focus on data-driven decision-making at the leadership level. It is almost the same process as the student-level data collection, but applied to teachers and the systems. For example, we are looking at our student attendance rate and our teacher’s scores on their competency rubric.

We want our instructional leaders to be able to track their progress towards their goals and course correct the school year based on the available data. The ongoing data collection enables us to figure out why something is happening and introduce interventions where necessary. It is the same principle as the student's level data, except applied to school programming as opposed to the student learning.

Did you start data at both levels simultaneously? Alternatively, did one precede the other?

(TT): No, even though we have operated for eight years, every year we add another grade level, and I think are always running to catch up. This is one reason why our strategic planning has not been as solid and our data collection around school-wide goals have not been able to be up and running. When you are making sure to take care of the urgent matters, you might not be able to dedicate sufficient time to make sure the systems are operational.

Victoria Bernhardt has written several excellent resources about using and presenting data at the student and school level. I have used her writings that focus on the leadership level. Just within the last year and a half, we have tried to apply the data in a more consistent and concrete way at the leadership level. I think you could start both data collection levels at the same time. However, it depends on who owns the data, the point for follow up, and follow through for each level.

Regarding the student level data collection, it is important to recognize that you do not have to reinvent the wheel for creating the assessments. You should ask other schools what kind of interim assessments they use and adapt them to meet your school’s needs. Once you have the assessments in place, you just need to be able to score and analyze them. Locating, adapting, and analyzing the common assessments can be team teacher driven.

Would you advise a school in the planning stages to focus on the leadership level earlier than you did? What moved to you focus on a data-driven decision-making at the school level?

(TT): Two major things moved us to start using data-driven decision-making at the school level. One is making use of our partnership with Paul Bambrick. Our leadership team had the opportunity to take a week long professional development course with him about goal setting and action planning. However, we did not do enough follow up throughout the year and we did not revisit those goals. I think we tried to do too much too quickly.

Using data to drive instruction became a research-based best practice in education, primarily when the 90/90/90 schools study (Doug Reeves) came out. Our founder and all our principals are graduates of New Leaders for New Schools, which promoted the use of interims as well. Our relationship with educational leaders like Kim Marshall and Paul Bambrick helped us adopt the practice early with support.

We took that year to learn that we needed to simplify our goals and we applied those lessons to our data-collection efforts at the leadership level. We focused on what we were going to be able to achieve and what data was going to be available to track and use.  We focused on creating realistic goals around the systems that actually existed. If you do not already have a data system in place, you cannot plan a world of data that is going to be miraculously collected. We had to think about what was too time consuming or too difficult to collect.  

What have you done this year to improve?

(TT): This year we streamlined and we have a top down model that is working a bit differently. The head of school has a set of goals and indicators that she is checking with the principals of each campus on a regular basis. The principals have their goals related to the head of school’s goals. For example, they need to show how many classroom observations they have done and 50% of instructional time of principals will be devoted to instructional observation or feedback. Then the principals provide the head of school with data around their number of observations and how their teachers perform based on their evaluations. This model is the vision, and I do think we are doing a better job of implementing the model than last year.

Are there any words of advice to charter schools that are in the planning or beginning stages of their life cycle?

(TT): Speaking as a founding member of the school, I would say that class and school culture is the most important. I would not be surprised if systems and cultures need to be the priority for the first year or two. Mission, culture, structure, and systems are so important because they are foundational pieces, and I do not think it would be easy to introduce interim assessments in the first year. The first couple years should focus on making sure the mission is clear, everyone is on board, and the culture of the school is in a good place. Our school partnerships are extremely important to us and as a result, we developed evidence-based practices. I would advise independent charter schools to create partnerships with other schools, organizations, and individuals.

For the readers:

Has your charter school started to become data-driven? What lessons have you learned? What advice would you give to others? Share your ideas in the comments section below or become a member of our CharterPost forum.

Please visit our Resource Library to find more information about creating and sustaining a data-driven school culture.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Lisa DiGaudio
Founding Board Member & Principal, New Dawn Charter School

Well, you can’t have a school without students now, can you? Your enrollment policy is so important at this time because it must be reflective of what you put in the charter. Remember, you were chartered based on certain “promises” you made to the state/authorizer when you wrote the full application. You can’t write your application for high school students and then decide that you’re going to be an elementary school. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, if you were to change your enrollment policy, you might have a deal breaker on your hands. Stick to what you wrote! (To see what we wrote for New Dawn Charter School, download a copy of our application.)

Make sure that your enrollment policy is aligned with state guidance and laws as well as your enrollment and retention targets listed in the charter. Be sure to include targets for English language learners (ELLs), students with disabilities and students eligible for free or reduced lunch. Even if it is not formally required, it is best to submit your enrollment policy to your authorizer prior to beginning the enrollment process in order to ensure full compliance with your charter and state laws/regulations.

Hand-in-hand with the enrollment policy should be your recruitment plan. As a charter school, you must perform outreach to your entire community, including  the ELL population as well as the Special Education population. So, where do you go and how do you effectively recruit students? Part of the process in getting your charter was reaching out to the community. The same needs to be done for recruitment. This means handing out flyers, attending school fairs, going to local churches, meeting local representatives, and attending community board meetings. All of these activities will put your school on the map. Radio spots, newspaper articles, interviews, anything you can do to get the mission and vision of the school out there for the public to see will help you make your numbers. Stick to your recruitment plan outlined in your charter. This will help you stay on course. Social media like facebook and twitter are also two methods to get your name out there. In many instances, you can connect all of these on your website, enabling visitors to see any kind of activity happening with the school. Check out the websites from some of the Model Schools in the Network of Independent Charter Schools to see how they provide materials and information to help in the recruitment process:

Academy of the City Charter School

Bridge Boston Charter School

Broome Street Academy

Challenge Pre Charter School

Heketi Community Charter School

Inwood Academy for Leadership

John W. Lavelle Preparatory Charter School

Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School

Lefferts Gardens Charter School

New Dawn Charter School

Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation

Staten Island Community Charter School

Tech International Charter School

Do not forget to make sure your recruitment materials are in the languages that dominate the community in which you seek to open. Handing out flyers in English will not encourage non-English speaking applicants to come to your school. By distributing flyers in many languages, community members know that you are in tune with the entire community living in the neighborhood who will benefit from having a charter school in the area. Again, this includes reaching out through local media (newspapers, radio and TV stations, etc.) but in multiple languages. I know of several schools that have weekly spots on different local radio stations, have had camera crews come in to do small spots advertising the school for websites and local TV stations, and have written small articles for the local papers in the languages spoken within their neighborhood. Making sure that your website is available in the predominant languages within your community is key to successful recruitment. See, for example, the Boston Bridge Charter School website, which uses the Microsoft Translator tool to allow users to translate pages in their website into various languages. There are a number of other translation tools available for free on the web, including Google Translate and Free Website Translation.

Reaching the special education population can be a bit tricky, as some potential parents do not want to entrust their children in a new school if they have special needs. One of the myths about charter schools is that special education students are not serviced in the same way as traditional public schools. It’s important to reach out to local supports for special education. (In New York State, you should contact your local Committee on Special Education). Establishing a relationship with local resources agencies is paramount to ensuring your students receive the proper services. It’s also important that parents see that you are active in implementing the goals set forth in a student’s individualized educational plan (IEP) and helping that student be successful in achieving those goals. These small steps speak volumes to parents and community members who may be skeptical of a charter school’s effectiveness in teaching students with IEP’s.

If you begin thinking about recruitment as soon as you are chartered, then you will be on the right track. Once again, there are many resources available to you for help. Authorizing agencies typically provide you with the timelines in which certain activities must be conducted. The Network for Independent Charter Schools, particularly through the Online Hotline, is available to help with questions and training that you may want to receive. Don’t be afraid to ask for help--it is there for the taking and is intended to help your school be successful! When we’re successful at recruitment, we are successful at helping more kids achieve their dreams.

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By Bill Wilson & Joe Nathan

After working in urban communities for a combination of more than 80 years, one of us serving as Minnesota’s State Commissioner of Human Rights and being elected first African American to serve as St. Paul’s City Council Chair, and helping produce major gains with low income and students of color, we vigorously disagree with a recent assertion on the Charter Notebook blog site that “…any achievement” by a group of students at a charter school that is predominantly of one race is “hollow.”  (Rachel Scott, "Independent Charter Schools and Diversity, Part One: The Problem of "Resegregation," January 18, 2012)

Imposed separation because of or on the basis of race or color is the classic definition of segregation. People choosing of their own free will to attend a public school is the exercise of liberty. The right to assemble and exercising freedom of choice is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. How then is choosing which charter school to attend not consistent with the right of assembly? Unlike imposed segregation, charter schools include all who apply or wish to come. Unlike segregated schools of the 1950’s and 1960’s, these schools most certainly do not exclude anyone because of their race or color of skin.

One of us (Wilson) responded several years ago at the Minnesota legislature to the charge that charter schools such as the one he founded were “segregated.” He differentiated between schools like his (Higher Ground Academy) and the segregated public school he was forced to attend in Indiana: “We had no choice,” he recalled. “I was forced to attend an inferior school, farther from home than nearby, better-funded ‘whites-only’ schools. Higher Ground is open to all. No one is forced to attend. Quite a difference.”

Minnesota’s largest daily newspaper, the Star Tribune has found for the last two years that the vast majority of Minneapolis-St Paul area public schools that are “beating the odds” are charter public schools. In September, 2011, a graphic appeared in the Star Tribune listing the 10 public schools in reading and math with high percentages of low income students that had the highest percentage of students proficient in reading or math on the official statewide examinations. See: www.startribune.com/newsgraphics/129810153.html.

The top eight of the ten schools listed in math were charter public schools, and the top nine of ten schools listed in reading were charter public schools. These were schools that “showed the highest percentage of students scoring at grade level or better, despite having a high number of students living in poverty.” To be eligible to be on the list, a school had to enroll at least 85% students from low-income families.

The vast majority of these high-ranking charter public schools enrolled 80% or more students of color. Many of the “beat the odds” schools enrolled 90% or more from one race. Bill Wilson, co-author of this blog post (and former Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights) founded and is director of one of these schools. US News and World Report also has listed the school Wilson helped start, Higher Ground Academy, as one of the nation’s finest high schools.

Denying the value of these schools, as Scott does in her recent blog post, reminds us of what Ralph Ellison wrote about in the civil rights classic, Invisible Man. Ellison wrote, in part, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

It is a well-known historical fact that slavery and segregation excluded black people from attending schools and colleges. Even so, abolitionists and other people of good will set forth a process for the building of educational institutions that would provide education to blacks as was being provided to the white population. Over time, many start-up institutions built a rich tradition and evolved into what is now known today as historically black colleges and universities. Today, by choice, many black and white students alike attend and graduate from these institutions. The valuable contributions historically black colleges and universities have and continue to make to the education of young men and women in America is unquestionable. Without these great educational institutions, generations of black and other persons of color will have gone without a meaningful education. Likewise, public charter schools of choice are at the beginning stages of serving as a viable conduit and pathway through which children of different backgrounds are able to access high quality education.

Higher Ground Academy as well as some other public charter schools are doing an exceptional job of educating children of color. The success of these charter schools can be attributed to setting high student expectations and also holding teachers accountability. At the end of the day, public charter schools will ultimately serve to raise the bar for America's K - 12 education system by demonstrating that all children, regardless of race or color, can and will learn.

Some charters on the Star Tribune “Beat the Odds” list enroll a variety of students. The Concordia Creative Learning Academy has a diverse student body, including African American, Hmong, Hispanic and white students. We think that freely selected, racially diverse schools certainly should be available as options for families.

The charter public school movement, in part, is about the expansion of opportunity and justice in American education (Nathan). The fact that civil rights hero Rosa Parks devoted part of the last decade of her life to the creation of charter schools is one more reminder of this heritage (Abdullah).

While far from perfect, many charter public schools that have attracted predominantly students of one race are accomplishing much more than Scott’s blog asserted. As Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat, has noted, if we are to make considerable progress in reducing achievement gaps and increasing overall achievement, we need to learn from and apply lessons from the nation’s most effective public schools, whether they are charter or district. But readers would not know, given the blogger’s bias, that some of Minnesota’s (and others around the country) most effective public schools are the ones she is criticizing.

We agree that all charters are not effective. Ineffective charters should be closed. Part of the rationale for chartering public schools comes from a remarkable 1968 Harvard Education Review article, “Alternative Public School Systems,” by African American psychologist Kenneth Clark. Professor Clark’s famous “doll study” was cited by the US Supreme Court in “Brown v. Board of Education.” Clark described “obstacles...to effective education” including “such fetishes as the inviolability of the neighborhood school concept.” Clark urged “Alternative Public School Systems... financed by states, operated outside traditional districts, that are created by colleges, universities, labor unions, business, industry....” (our emphasis). Sound familiar?  Such groups have started some of the most effective charter public schools in the country.

Enrollment in Minnesota charter public schools continues to grow – from less than 10,000 ten years ago to about 39,000 this year. This growth has occurred as enrollment in district public schools has declined. And charters in Minneapolis and Minnesota enroll a higher percentage of low income, limited English speaking and students of color than the average district public schools.

Some families found their youngsters excelled in district public schools. District public schools remain an important option, as they were for our families. Making progress requires, in part, identifying and learning from outstanding public schools. Describing achievement in places like Harvest Prep and Higher Ground Academy as “hollow”  hurts, rather than helps work for greater justice in this country.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

NOTES:

Abdullah, Halimah, “Rights Hero Seeks to Open School in Detroit: Rosa Parks joins the growing charter school movement,” The New York Times, June 30, 1997, p. A12. 

Clark, Kenneth B. “Alternative public school systems.” Harvard Educational Review 32, no. 1 (Winter, 1968): 100–113.

Nathan, Joe. Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity in American Education. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1997.

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Lisa DiGaudio
Curriculum Developer for Charter Schools

I want to get the dialogue going around the curricular shifts for Common Core. This can be so difficult for schools that are well-entrenched in their own curriculum, especially as their resources are already aligned to support that curriculum. I’m going to start by reflecting on what I wrote for my grade level teams at Lefferts Garden Charter School and sharing what some of their feedback has been.

First, I’m not a big believer, particularly at the Elementary level, of a standardized textbook. Facts are left out, topics are watered down into these miserable little passages. I don’t remember what textbook it was, but I remember being totally shocked at the one paragraph in a sixth-grade textbook that described the Holocaust as “reference material”. That being said, my curriculum maps outline the topic and essential questions, along with different resources, primary and secondary, to use for support. Of course, because I am writing it, I didn’t think twice about whether this would be complex or not for a new teacher to visualize. Low and behold, after a training courtesy of our participation with the Network of Independent Charter Schools, feedback included a need for a textbook or additional resources.

My first reaction was one of surprise. Why would a textbook be useful when they are so limited? But then I started thinking about my first year as a teacher. I was hired the day before school started. I was petrified. I had no curriculum, and there were no books. I was lucky I had great teammates that gave me a curriculum map from the year before so I could start planning. That’s when it hit me. The resources were given out, but maybe I needed to better explain how to use them. This led me right into curricular shift one for Common Core: the balance between fiction and nonfiction texts for instruction.

At the elementary level, the goal is to use 50% informational and 50% fictional text to support your lessons. For my team that needed the extra support in using resources, the first order of business is to do an inventory of fictional and nonfictional texts to use during the units of instruction and how to use them. What will the teaching points be? What are the goals for student learning? How should these resources extend into other subject areas? Starting with the overarching questions is key to building a strong foundation for new teachers,as well as giving seasoned teachers new ideas from different perspectives.

I was thinking about the first unit that we all seem to teach on some degree the first month of school: All About Me. Every year, the kids come strolling in and we have them write some fluff piece on their summer vacation or something that happened to them while they were out of school so we can see to what degree they can put words together in sentence form. Then from there we build on that to establish the classroom community, the school community, the local community and then larger and larger, state, country, continent, world. For our early elementary children, spatial awareness in this direction helps them see beyond themselves, and become aware that there are children next to them who can be just like them or be different. It’s with this very basic outline that we can begin to investigate resources to teach children how to expand their awareness beyond themselves.

The first place to go for resources is your classroom. Take an inventory of your nonfiction books first since that may be a challenge for some of your staff. When we hear nonfiction, we think “textbook”. We have to remind ourselves that literacy is more than just reading fictional materials, and it’s more than just reading. It’s discussing, it’s writing, it’s talking all the while using text evidence to support what you’re trying to say. After gathering nonfiction books on the topic, now pick the same amount of books in fiction. There’s your 50% balance. For every piece of informational text, a fictional text should also be used. Need help getting ideas? Log into the Scholastic website (www.scholastic.com). They have a book wizard function for teachers and administrators looking for different resources. In some cases you can access free downloads. (Free is always good!) Other great resources? Try YouTube. There are a number of teaching channels that include all sorts of resources to support your teaching students to learn more about themselves and the world around them. If you have a subscription to Discovery Education (www.unitedstreaming.com), there are literally thousands of videos with lesson plans included to teach just about any topic you can imagine.

The biggest resource we forget is the students themselves. The best way to show them the difference between a primary and secondary resource is to play a game of telephone with them. The first person to speak the message is the primary source. Everyone else is secondary, and to verify what they say is correct, they have to cite who they got the information from (their friend next to them). When so many things get all jumbled up, it’s funny to track who heard what in the circle. Student experience is the strongest teacher, and they will always remember the difference between primary and secondary sources! (Trust me, I have kids who are now almost out of high school asking me if I remember doing that with them, along with making the loser sign for right angles; making an “L” with your thumb and forefinger and placing it on your forehead).

When you break down Shift One of the Common Core in this way--whether you are a brand new school or you have been around for some time and still worried about how this is all going to work--it becomes more manageable.

Next week, Shift Two, Knowledge in the Disciplines for Grades 6-12!

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By Rachel Scott, The Finance Project

I grew up attending public magnet schools in Indianapolis in the 1980’s, and it never occurred to me that the student body of other schools was any different from mine: about half black and half white with smaller numbers of Latino and Asian students. What I didn’t know at that time was that the magnet schools I attended, in addition to providing innovative programming not offered by my neighborhood schools, were part of an intentional national policy effort to ensure students were learning in diverse environments that reflected the richness of their communities.

Thirty years later, charter schools around the country now find themselves at the center of the “school choice” movement and there are fewer magnet schools. Charter schools most certainly are serving a broad array of children in all types of settings. In the aggregate, we can say “charter schools are diverse” and “families in all kinds of neighborhoods now have ‘school choice.’” However, a number of studies show that, intentionally or unintentionally, many families are choosing to send their children to schools where the majority of the students are just like them—resulting in what some call a “resegregation” of public schools. In fact, a high school friend of mine who is a school librarian in a major city recently told me, “We have two kinds of charter schools here: the white ones and the black ones.”

Is “resegregation” really a problem?

Among other researchers, The Urban Institute and The Century Foundation have highlighted the fact that school choice tends to lead to racial and socioeconomic segregation. Adverse effects of this segregation are felt by students in both high-income and low-income schools. Schools with a majority of low-income students tend to have fewer resources to expend on the students and more difficulty attracting the most qualified teachers. Schools with a majority of higher-income students tend to produce students who have more difficulty working with and communicating with people who are different from them.

Particular to charter schools, Miron, et al found in a study of demographic patterns in 968 largely Education Management Organization (EMO)-run schools that only a quarter had enrollment demographics similar to those of the sending district, with concentrations of either majority or minority students dominating enrollment at most schools. Not only that, Miron and his team found that these EMO-run schools enrolled smaller percentages of both special education and ELL students, and that:

Most charter schools were divided into either very segregative high-income schools or very segregative low-income schools. Between 70% and 73% of the schools were in the extreme categories of the scale, depending on the comparison.

Of course, a high concentration of minority students in a charter school can be precisely what some charter school leaders have in mind. A two-part series of articles in the Orlando Sentinel last year includes discussion by some charter school proponents who say that achieving higher scores for minority students is their purpose entirely. While this goal is laudable, any achievement for a group of students in an artificially isolated environment that even unintentionally "shields" them from the real climate of their community is a hollow one—a sentiment echoed by groups like AAUW who oppose single-sex education environments.

Leaders of independent charter schools are in a good position to learn from these troubling trends seen with many larger charter organizations, and are more likely to have the flexibility to change policies or practices that may be resulting in a lack of diversity in their schools.

“Not Discriminating” is Not Enough

In some ways, it would be easy for charter schools to solve the problem of over-concentrations of some student populations in schools if the problem were caused by simple discrimination. However, more likely, at the roots of ‘school choice’ (that we have seen more often results in segregation) are a number of very complex, deep-seated, and interrelated factors like culture, family attitudes and expectations, and what “feels comfortable” to any of us.

Socialization is a powerful and often invisible force, and knowing how difficult it can be to make people revisit their attitudes may make some charter school leaders wonder if it’s worth the effort. Is it the job of charter schools, in addition to meeting students’ educational needs, to provide students with diverse classroom settings? I would argue, yes. Further, there has been an increased focus on Civil Rights Office at the U.S. Department of Education, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has identified education “as a key civil right.” The Department recently released guidelines on voluntary ways schools can make reasonable, fair, and legal efforts to encourage diverse enrollment, summarized here by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

I look forward to your feedback and plan to revisit this topic in the near future, especially as it relates to special education, English Language Learners, and successful strategies independent charter schools have used to ensure their schools are true reflections of their communities.

What are you seeing that works, or doesn’t work, in your school or community?

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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By Shawn Stelow Griffin, The Finance Project

The Network of Independent Charter Schools is at its heart, a project about connections. Leaders and teachers in traditional school systems or local education agencies benefit from meetings of district peers as well as consultation with other experts in fiscal, regulatory, and curricular issues. Wholly independent charter schools need to develop comparable relationships among their peers—a task that is often near the bottom of the to-do list for a busy school leader. From its conception, the Network of Independent Charter Schools has sought to provide these services through its website. The Network also helps to connect charter school leaders to vetted research and best practice libraries.

 Blogs are posted regularly on The Charter Notebook. The Network of Independent Charter Schools has attracted a diverse group of regular bloggers including the founder of an independent charter school in New York City, researchers, consultants with state and federal policy backgrounds, and experts in financing non-profit and public education and social service programs. Readers are invited to add to The Charter Notebook on the blogs and are free to engage with or question the writer’s perspective and hypothesis.

 The project’s partners felt strongly that the website should provide access to a free and confidential Help Desk for independent charter schools. Consider the Online Hotline for Independent Charter Schools your personal research assistant. The Online Hotline staff has over 25 years of experience in charter school authorization, charter school operations, and school leadership, as well as sustaining and financing of school and community initiatives and translating charter school finance and governance research into practice. The Online Hotline staff can be your “Consultants On-Call.”

Losing sleep over a curriculum question?—email us. Looking for data or information to support a proposal to your school trustees?—ask us! Wondering how to accurately estimate facilities costs? Not wanting to reinvent the wheel when surely someone else has already been through a difficult contracting process? That's what we are here for--to help make decision making, instruction and leadership at independent charter schools.

Our experts receive questions from all over the country, and take the time to dig into your issue and get you an answer within 48 hours. We look forward to hearing from you!

Ask a question now!

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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By Rachel Scott, The Finance Project

Connectedness to the learning community, excitement about what each new school day can bring, positive relationships with role models, consistent performance, a commitment to come back next year... these are some of the outcomes independent charter schools hope to elicit for kids in their schools. With a rate of 25% teacher turnover (compared to 14% at public schools) in one study, charter school leaders must also think about how to bring about those sorts of outcomes for their teachers. While schools’ charters often give administrators the flexibility to ensure that the teachers they employ have the right skills and the right "fit" with a school, the majority of turnover can still be attributed to voluntary choice by the teachers.

Beyond the obvious costs of frequently searching for, hiring, and orienting new teachers to charter schools, teacher attrition has other costs that are harder to quantify.  David Stuit and Thomas M. Smith at Vanderbilt University (2009) recap the findings of several researchers who find that teachers with the strongest academic achievement themselves are the ones most likely to leave charter schools (and the teaching profession altogether) -- a move that pulls some of the most qualified teachers out of charter schools. Perhaps just as costly, when teachers don't return, the critical network of adults at any given charter school who know the children well and are invested in their success as they grow erodes.

Causes for Teacher Attrition
Discovering the reasons why good teachers leave is essential to knowing what leaders of independent charter schools can do to keep them.  Research on the subject is readily available. It is worth noting, however, that the examination of teacher attrition in charter schools is often connected to other political or ideological 'baggage." Charter school leaders must understand that teacher retention is, to a large degree, linked to other sensitive issues like unionization of charter school teachers and comparative assessments of student achievement between independent charter schools, managed multi-site charters, and public schools.

Several studies point to the relatively young age of charter school teachers (compared to public school teachers) as the strongest predictor of turnover, as it is with teachers in any setting. Other factors correlated with teacher attrition in charter schools include: low number of years at the school, non-certified teachers or teachers teaching outside their certification areas, and "teachers' relative satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the school's: 1) mission, 2) perceived ability to attain the mission, and 3) administration and governance" (Miron and Applegate; Western Michigan University, 2007).)  One study of teacher attrition in charter schools in Wisconsin that controls for many of these factors concludes that "high turnover rates in Wisconsin charter schools appear to be a disadvantaged school problem rather than a charter school problem per se"-- pointing perhaps to increased needs for more wraparound services for students and families, as well as teacher support and training in cultural competence.

Others posit that teachers are less likely to want to stay in charter schools where they tend to be paid less than in public schools and are more likely to be without union protection. In fact, the Century Foundation suggests that 90% of charter schools are non-unionized environments, and many teachers cite job security and protection of wages and benefits as primary factors as they select jobs.

What Indie Charter School Leaders Can Do to Keep Good Teachers

• Maximize wages and benefits to attract qualified teachers as you develop your school budget. Look at what district teachers and other charter school teachers are being paid in your region, and ensure your salary and benefits packages are competitive. Within the range of salaries you can offer, ideally you should be able to hire a mix of seasoned and new teachers. Low-balling salaries makes it far more likely that your school would not be the employer of choice for qualified candidates and it reduces the number of experienced teachers in a school who can serve as mentors for younger teachers. Using the Cost Estimation Tool and Revenue Planning Tools developed by the National Resource Center on Charter Schools can help you realistically estimate costs and plan for ways to beef up your funding. 
• Give teachers a voice in developing school policies and curricula. For many charter school teachers, the autonomy and opportunity to be creative in their work is what draws them to their jobs in the first place!  So, ask teachers about the ways they would like to be involved in decision making. Solicit their input frequently and openly as you make decisions. Consider using an outside facilitator to help you get their input for very critical decisions. Let teachers know you value their input and how you plan to use it; if you ultimately make a decision that contradicts their input, let them know in a respectful way why you decided that way. Ensure that teachers' voices are directly and regularly heard by your governance body.
• Make teacher buy-in and integral aspect of the mission of your school and give teachers the support they need to execute that mission. Find interesting and innovative ways to connect meetings and professional development opportunities to the school's mission in order to keep teachers excited about what you're accomplishing together. Resist the urge to do most of the talking when you convene staff. Build a strengths-based and transparent system to support teachers who need help. Visit classrooms often. Recognize teachers who are executing the mission in creative, effective and fun ways.
•  Leverage available supports for high-need or vulnerable students and their families. Teachers in charter schools often put in longer hours for less pay than their district counterparts.  Their jobs can be overwhelming -- especially for young and inexperienced teachers. Rarely are teachers also trained social workers. So, ensure that your school offers adequate resources to meet the needs of English language learners and special education students. If there are other basic unmet needs for students and families, such as health and mental health care, child care, food supports, or housing, look for community nonprofits or community action agency partners who can help meet these needs. In some cases, the school itself can access federal, state or local funds to meet these needs. Check out issue-specific funding guides, like LEARNING TO READ: A Guide to Federal Funding for Grade-Level Reading Proficiency, for ideas on how to bring in resources for students and families with specific needs.

Human resource management may or may not be your leadership strong suit. But knowledge of the research that exists on teacher attrition in charter schools along with careful planning to avoid it can help keep great teachers at your school, enrich your organizational culture, and ensure that students at your charter school benefit from having the best available teachers in their classrooms.  

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Outside of writing the full charter school application, preparing for the interview with the review committee is one of the most stressful parts in the chartering process. This is the job interview of all job interviews, folks. It seems like a huge task, the applicant group sitting with the review committee around a table, needing to answer their questions on point. For some board members who may have expertise in banking or real estate, for example, they may have a hard time understanding the nuances of the instructional program. On the other side of that, educators may have a hard time fielding responses related to the budget over the five-year period or the impact of using a private facility instead of shared space. Either way, the committee needs to be comfortable with each other, be able to jump in and respond where appropriate and most of all, be confident with the panel and the team.

The New Dawn applicant group was at an advantage, as most of us had worked together in various stages on the PICCS program, which helps charter schools implement a series of tools to help drive performance forward for all students. With the experience and training in our PICCS school improvement engine, we were already aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the group, and we all took pieces of the charter that would showcase our strengths. We spent hours upon hours studying and building a “go-to closet” of resources that we could cite when responding to questions. For example, if a question came from the panel regarding our accommodation of the projected ELL population in the school, not only should any one of us be able to answer that question, but we should be able to cite curriculum and other resources to support our response. This meant studying a great deal of information over a very short period of time.

Slowly, we built out our sections of expertise. Each of us took our areas of expertise and worked on these elements, making notes, practicing answering questions with each other, and then having a conversation about our responses. Like following a Peer Review protocol, we each gave warm and cool feedback to increase our ability to respond and improve the level of ease in which we could answer questions in our field of comfort, and out of our field of comfort.

The New York City Charter School Center was so helpful in this regard. We scheduled a meeting with the center as a “mock interview.” The panel asked us very tough, very pointed questions, and if we did not respond in a way that completely answered the question, they would redirect and force a response out. After the question and answer period, the panel gave us feedback on every aspect of our responses. If you don't have such an ally organization in your area, then reach out to other charter schools that are already open and see if members of their founding team would be willing to hold a "mock interview" for you.

This process was extremely helpful! They critiqued our opening statement, the way we actually looked when we answered questions, and whether we smiled or showed we were nervous. They were even able to show us how to look confident when we might falter on a response. They advised us on where to sit (which of the panel should sit next to each other to show unity) and how to sit. It actually reminded me of a funny seen in Ocean’s 11, when Brad Pitt’s character is telling Matt Damon’s character to do all of these things in his performance with Andy Garcia, “Don’t say three words when two will do, don’t keep your hands in your pockets, don’t look away, he’ll think you have something to hide.” The depth to the feedback really gave our teams the ability to further prepare, and to prepare well. So thank you so much, once again, Charter School Center staff!

Having that vital feedback then gave us the chance to go to work. We made notes, we read the charter inside and out. We practiced with each other. The more you practice, the better you get at responding. It really gives you the confidence walking in to the real thing that you've “got this.” The other factor was the level of trust that our team had in each other. We all had each other’s backs. During the interview we would support each other, filling out answers when needed, and each of us had a chance to respond to the panel. Thanks to the rigorous mock interview we had with the Center, when we met our review panel, the entire meeting just flew by. We were able to answer the questions with ease, we were able to be comfortable with the panel (who were very inviting and supportive in their own right), and after it was all said and done, the panel warmly thanked each of us, noting the preparation we had brought to the table.

Just like the public meeting, there a few things to be absolutely ready for: 

• Treat your appointment like a job interview. DO NOT show up in jeans and a sweater. Suits only folks!
• Make sure you remember everyone’s name on your panel. People tend to make very silly mistakes when they get nervous. Write everyone’s name down by creating a very simple seating chart, so you can mention your reviewer or colleague by name when you need to speak.
•  Smile. It really shows confidence and ability.
•  Write the key words of the question down, and take your time responding. Showing that you are thoughtful and not just pulling information out of a hat so to speak will win points.
•  Make sure when you leave that you shake every reviewer’s hand and thank them. They spend a lot of time reviewing your application and your interview. Ultimately their feedback is the key in getting your application chartered.

It was quite an accomplishment for New Dawn making it through this process. We are lucky to have a close knit group of educators dedicated to building student achievement. We work together on various levels and share many of the same ideas on effective instructional practices. We took the time to be organized, to practice, and to be super prepared. In the end, all of these elements truly helped us be successful.

Next up…Hooray we’re chartered! Now what do we do?

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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According to New York State Law (as well as charter law in most other states and localities), the public must be sufficiently informed about charter schools in their community throughout the process. One of the last steps before the interview process is the public hearing. The purpose of the application hearing is to provide the public a chance to ask questions of the charter group, namely the lead applicant and founding team. Many concerns are raised during these hearings, particularly when charter schools are seeking to share space with district-operated public schools. Prospective charters may have to delay their openings because at the last minute if the district-operated school works to prevent the charter school from entering the building. These discussions can be extremely contentious, and just because there may be open space in a district-operated school does not mean sharing will be welcomed or even tolerated.

The public meeting usually takes place in a location that is common to other schools that are seeking to open in the district. The prospective schools arrive with materials that describe the mission and vision of the school. Each school has the opportunity to speak about the mission and vision of their school, and then respond to public comment. We treated this hearing as a “practice” of our interview with the review panel. One of the most important things to demonstrate to the public and to the review committee is the unity you have with your founding team. You must be in full agreement on how the school is going to run. Your responses should be able to flow seamlessly from one person to the next. You have to show confidence, sincerity and knowledge. You have to respond to tough questions with the same grace. It’s a good place to put that to practice, as the public hearing, though not a factor in getting the charter (in New York State), can cause the review committee to raise questions if there is a serious outcry from the public hearing.

Our public hearing for New Dawn Charter School's application took place shortly before our interview with the review committee. Fortunately, there were no concerns raised at the meeting about our school. This was in great part due to our outreach and engagement of the community in the process of developing the charter application (see a discussion of how to identify the right founding team members to assist with this process in my post on Writing the Letter of Intent). In fact we were honored to have a community member speak positively on our behalf.  But this isn’t always the case. I have attended meetings in the past where charter applicants have to come to these public meetings and not taken them seriously. Follow these easy points, and this hurdle can be easily cleared:

• Dress professionally. While this may seem obvious, it is important to share this point with all of the individuals representing your team. The public hearing is your chance to show you are a professional group.
• Speak clearly and answer questions directly.
• Make eye contact when you speak (I’m not kidding. I watched a presenter never lift his gaze from the floor. This does not project confidence or trust.)
• Do not show you are flustered by tough questions. Getting defensive or giving wrong answers can happen when you get nervous, but this only makes the audience angry.
• Be humble. I’m a big believer that when you are dealing with children, your ego has to get checked at the door. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to teaching and learning, and you must be open to hearing every single one. It’s about the children, not you.
• Be gracious. Thank the audience for the time, be accessible after the meeting convenes if it seems that there might be other questions.

Transparency is the key to being in control. If you show you are willing and able to show the community the ins and outs of your school organization, the more trusting they will be of your presence in the community. Know your charter in and out, and be able to speak to every element in it. Community members will feel good knowing that the applicant group knows their stuff and  are comfortable with each other and their community!

Next time…the big “show”! The Interview.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Dr. Charisse Gulosino

Visiting Scholar, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis, Columbia University Teachers College;  Affiliate Research Faculty Member, Loyola Institute for Quality and Equity in Education, Loyola University New Orleans

In this post, I explore some aspects of the phenomenon of charter schools in rural America. I started out by mapping the extent of student poverty, the demographic makeup of the student population, and the "rural" locational context of rural charter schools. The maps reveal a varied rural charter school student population. While 70 percent of rural charter schools are predominantly White, the rest serve predominantly minority students. Regardless of the predominant race/ethnicity of their student enrollment, rural charter schools attract a high percentage of students living in poverty. Though most rural charter schools are located in non-urbanized areas (79 percent), a sizable percentage are in urbanized areas and urban clusters as well. The maps reveal that the geographic boundaries of rural areas are not clear-cut, in part due to the many rural-suburban-urban interlinkages. These findings provide fertile ground in which to study rural charter schools nationwide.  

The topic of rural charter schools is a relatively new area of research.  The aim is to begin filling in part of this information gap by examining how rural charter schools respond to the policy and market signals, and the impact of such signals on the willingness and ability of rural charter schools to serve disadvantaged student populations.

 Through USDA's Rural Development Community Facilities support program, the U.S. Education Department is providing a policy incentive for states to boost their support for rural charter schools in communities with fewer than 20,000 people. Though the design and operation of rural charter schools is not specifically meant to resolve racial/ethnic disparities in education or to specifically serve disadvantaged students, rural charter schools do have challenges serving low-income and minority students. Charter-school initiatives in the rural areas hold both promises and problems. On the one hand, rural areas with a history of civic involvement, a vision that allows households to exercise school choice options, and the desire for a sustainable small school could provide fertile ground for a charter school (Rural Policy Matters, 2011; Broton et al., 2009; Richard, 2004). On the other hand, many rural areas are economically disadvantaged and also face shortages of academically talented teachers, transportation services, start-up funds and school facilities. These  are significant obstacles for charter school creation and sustainability (National Charter School Resource Center, 2011; Miller & Hansen, 2010; Wittmeyer, 2006).

I focus on the 39 states that have rural charter schools in 2010. Rural charter schools in these states account for 16 percent of the entire U.S. charter schools. The analysis looks at only one aspect of the rural charter school story - the location of rural charter schools and the variation in the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic composition of student population enrolled in them. If rural charter schools are to expand, it will be useful to examine where rural charter schools are currently operating across different states and the characteristics of students attending them, giving us insights into the workings of charter school options in rural areas.

The “rural” status of charter schools is based on the locale codes available from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and designed to be consistent with census categories and geographic regions from U.S. Census Bureau. By those definitions, rural areas are those regions outside urbanized areas and urban clusters.  Urbanized areas and urban clusters are defined by population density and population. Under the NCES coding system,  a school is classified as "rural" based on its geographic proximity to population centers. Rural schools are further classified into fringe, distant, and remote schools depending on the distance from an urbanized area of greater than 50,000 people or an urban cluster of between 25,000 and 50,000 people. For more information on NCES local classification system, see http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ruraled/page2.asp) The charter schools that fall under the classification of rural therefore encompass a variety of charter school settings which include such diverse examples as rural charter schools in the farming communities in Kansas, predominantly Native Americans living on reservations, the fishing communities of the Gulf Coast, and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina.

I have linked the NCES Common Core of Data with the Census Bureau TIGER/Line shapefiles and geocodes for the school addresses to explore the enrollment demographics and location of rural charter schools for the 2010 school year. To assess the spatial distribution of rural charter schools, I cleaned and standardized the school addresses and converted them to geocoded locations.  In all, I have obtained geocoded addresses for 820 of 825 rural charter schools, a geocoding success rate of 99%.  

I have analyzed enrollment demographics based on five major racial/ethnic groups in the school population:  Black, White, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic.  I consider the predominance of one particular group if that population is equal or greater than fifty percent of a school’s population.  I followed the standard practice in the education and social science research and measure poverty at the school level by using the percentage of students who apply for and were found eligible for free and reduced price lunch program (FRL). The free and reduced lunch (FRL) percentages are broken down for school-level populations being studied. The five major racial/ethnic groupings are described below. 

• Black: Black/African-American persons, not Hispanic/Latino.
• White: White persons, not Hispanic/Latino.
• Native-American: Native-American persons, not Hispanic/Latino.
• Asian: Asian and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific islander persons, not Hispanic/Latino. Hispanic: Persons of any race who are Hispanic/Latino.

The next series of maps identify rural charter schools contained in urbanized areas and urban clusters, non-urbanized areas, and Native American reservations.  The actual locations of these schools and the percentage of their students eligible for FRL are also divided into equal intervals and symbolized as dots colored in scaled color densities from light to dark.  These maps confirm the presence of rural charter schools that are considered rural but are contained in urbanized areas and urban clusters.  There are also rural charter schools that are located in non-urbanized areas.  A number of rural charter schools are located in geographically and tribally diverse Native American reservations.  A series of location and context specific questions will be explored as we examine these maps.

The inset map at the top shows the total number of rural charter schools per state, while the inset map at the bottom shows the rural charter school percentage share of the charter school market for each state (Map 1).  States vary considerably with regard to the count of rural charter schools located in rural areas, from a low of 1 to a high of 123. The highest percentages of rural charter schools are found in Wyoming, Kansas, and Iowa. The smallest percentages of rural charter schools are found in predominantly urban states on the East and West coasts.  

Map 1

The average percentage of students eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL), in all rural charter schools, is 35.39 percent, but there are stark differences in poverty levels across rural charter schools.  The percentage of FRL students in rural charter schools are skewed towards low poverty.  Map 2 reveals the following statistics: 300 rural charters have 0-20 percent students on FRL; 150 rural charters have 21-40 percent students on FRL; 142 rural charters have 41-60 percent students on FRL; 130 rural charters have 41-60 percent students on FRL; and 98 rural charters have 41-60 percent students on FRL.

Map 2

There does not appear to be any group predominance for 90 out of 820 rural charters, as shown in Map 3.  These schools are skewed towards low poverty.  50 percent of these schools have 0-20 percent students on FRL, which include rural charters in states such as Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Tennessee and South Carolina. 

Map 3

 Only 11 rural charter schools are predominantly Asian. Their mean percentage of students eligible for FRL is 50.28 percent, approximately 15 percent above the national average of rural charter schools' student poverty.   One rural charter in Texas has 0-20 percent students on FRL, while rural charters in Hawaii are skewed towards higher poverty, serving between 18 percent and 83 percent of students on FRL (See Map 4). 

Map 4  

31 rural charters are predominantly Black, or about 4 percent of the total number of rural charter schools.  Their mean percentage of students eligible for FRL is 64.01 percent, approximately 29 percent above the national average of rural charter schools' student poverty.  26 of these schools are serving between 41 percent and  99 percent of students on FRL.  Predominantly Black rural charters with higher poverty levels are found in states such as Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Michigan (See Map 5).    

Map 5

32 rural charter schools are predominantly Native-American.  Their mean percentage of students eligible for FRL is 61.22 percent, approximately 26 percent above the national average of rural charter schools' student poverty.  24 of these schools are serving between 40 percent and  98 percent of students on FRL.  Predominantly Native American rural charters are found in states such as Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Alaska (See Map 6).   

Map 6

67 rural charters are predominantly Hispanic, or about 8 percent of the total number of rural charter schools.  Their mean percentage of students eligible for FRL is 52.65 percent, about 17 percent above the national average of rural charter schools' student poverty.  52 of these schools are serving between 21 percent and  98 percent of students on FRL.  Predominantly Hispanic rural charters are found in states such as Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California (See Map 7).     

Map 7

575 rural charters are predominantly White, or 70 percent of the total number of rural charter schools.  Their mean percentage of students eligible for FRL is 31.28 percent, approximately 4 percent below the national average of rural charter schools' student poverty.  These schools are skewed towards low poverty; 250 of them are serving 0-20 percent students on FRL.  The concentration of predominantly White rural charters are found in states such as Oregon, California, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan (See Map 8).  

Map 8

A comparison of rural charters found within urbanized areas and urban clusters shows the differences in student poverty levels for these two geographic regions, with is skewed towards less poverty in urbanized areas.  Maps 9.1 and 9.2 illustrate the proximity of charters to an urbanized area and an urban cluster categorized as fringe, distant, or remote.  Both maps show similar percentages of rural charters in fringe rural (63%), distant rural (23%), and remote rural (14%).

Maps 9.1 and 9.2

Map 10

Map 11

In summary, the foregoing maps illustrate that the majority of charter schools serving rural America are white (70%) and economically disadvantaged (4% above the national average of rural charter schools' student poverty).  Less than one-fourth (31 schools) are predominantly African-American rural charters, and predominantly Hispanic charters make up only 8 percent of the total.  Approximately 4 percent are predominantly Native Americans charters, while 1 percent of the schools are predominantly Asian.  Rural charter schools with no group predominance are about 11 percent of the total.  Student poverty levels are most severe for rural charter schools that are predominantly African-American and Native American, which ranges between 61.22 percent and 64.01, or about 29 percent higher than the average for all rural charters.  The share of student poverty levels for predominantly Hispanic rural charters and predominantly Asian rural charters are 52.65 percent and 50.28 percent, respectively. Rural charter schools with no predominant group have the lowest percentage of student poverty (30.57 percent), or about 5 percent lower than the average for all rural charters.  These statistics show that addressing school choice in the rural areas will require solutions to both the poverty gap of minority student populations and economically disadvantaged conditions in rural schools.   

Of course, there are other dimensions of rural charter school enrollment demographics which are not captured in this analysis.  The geo-spatial analysis of rural charter schools is exploratory in its nature and limited to examining the charter demographics.  I did not consider the age and grade levels of charter schools, organizational orientation, state charter school regulations such as racial/ethnic enrollment guidelines, equity provisions such as free transportation to all students, and other local characteristics all of which may have an effect on charter school demographics as found in previous charter school studies (Bifulco et al., 2009a, 2009b; Garcia, 2008; Renzulli & Evans, 2005).  All such topics/dimensions remain unexplored but fruitful areas for future research in rural charter schools nationwide.  Thus, future work might be helped by capturing several dimensions of rural charter school enrollment demographics based on previous studies and policy debates on charter schools in general.

1) State and local policy on transportation - Previous findings suggest that charter school enrollments are influenced by state and local policies.  For example, a multi-state study of charter schools by Lacireno-Paquet (2004) found that states where transportation for charter school students is not required have lower percentages of FARL-eligible and minority students than do charter schools in states where some kind of transportation of charter students is required.  In Pennsylvania, Miron, Nelson, and Risley (2002) found that charter school students travel 5.5 miles, on average, to attend a charter school.  In states such as Indiana where charter schools do not receive local tax levies for transportation, the transportation issue is a de facto parental responsibility as well as a disincentive for poor families to exercise their freedom and choice.  Low-income households may lack sufficient resources to transport their children to the nearest charter schools, as in the case of those living in Indiana's rural areas who travel more than 40 miles to get to the nearest charter schools. Indeed, transportation of students is an important state/local policy in understanding how rural charter schools may attract students and families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

2)  State law on racial clauses and enrollment preferences - Notable scholars such as  Amy Wells, Bruce Fuller and Robert Bifulco claim that charter school policies may have exacerbated existing inequality and stratification in urban, suburban, and  rural school districts (Wells, 2002; Fuller et. al., 2003; Bifulco et al., 2009a, 2009b).  Renzulli (2006) examined charter schools in states without racial clauses designed to ensure the fair representation of racial and ethnic subgroups had smaller numbers of African-American students in charter schools.  While many state legislatures continue to make amendments to their state charter school laws, there are currently fourteen states that have existing racial balancing provisions designed to limit or eliminate racial isolation and imbalance in charter schools (Oluwole & Green, 2008).  In the case of the Indiana charter school law, charter schools could only accept students in persistently failing schools or who were enrolled in FRL programs. Further research on rural charter schools may examine how the policies enacted by states either foster or hinder charter schools’ service to certain student enrollment demographics (i.e., minority students and FRL students). 

3) The number of charter schools allowed in a state - In terms of the number of schools permitted, a cap on the total number of charter schools allowed per state/school district could restrict educational alternatives to underserved populations and resource-poor rural areas.  Permitting only a small number of charter schools may also impede the creation of a viable alternative to struggling public schools, as found in one study of the effect of state caps on students' academic performance (CREDO, 2009). While state legislators and school district officials may try to handle the competition potentially introduced by rural charter schools, for example, by restricting the total number of schools, empirical work is needed to examine if these types of policies may result in artificial constraints on the market with unintended consequences for particular student targets (i.e., low-income and minority students) and academic outcomes in rural areas. 

4)  Types of charter schools that serve rural schools - The Charter Management Organization (CMO) movement, such as KIPP, represents one form of organizational orientation—the not-for profit form.  In the case of Arkansas, a state considered as entirely rural, KIPP and Lighthouse Academies have been encouraged to establish a strong presence in rural areas. While contracting with CMOs such as KIPP is not new to education, what is empirically interesting is to examine the relationship between organizational characteristics of the schools, like CMO-management status versus stand-alone schools (i.e., parent-founded), and the enrollment demographics served.  Both types of educational organizations tend to build their charters slowly and incrementally, grade by grade, over a period of years, and reach capacities well below national averages.  Such enrollment strategy may be suitable to rural areas with declining enrollments, a particular problem for low-income rural districts. However, unanswered questions remain.  Who do both educational organizations serve as they pursue students in rural areas?  Are they reaching out to students in clear need?  A recent study by Miron et al. (2011) noted that while KIPP schools served a higher percentage of African-American students and students eligible for FRL than did their local school districts, they also enrolled fewer students with disabilities, English Language Learners (ELL), and Hispanic students.  Whether both types of educational organizations capture a niche market of underserved and disadvantaged populations in rural areas is largely an open field of research.

5) Other local characteristics - The racial composition of a rural charter school can be fully understood only in relation to the racial composition of the state, school district, or the broader neighborhood in which it is located (Gulosino & d’Entremont, 2011; Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011; Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009).  Knowing what percent of rural charter schools  in the nation or a state are predominantly white or predominantly minority (i.e., Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native-American) does not tell us anything about how they are physically distributed in school systems: they could be distributed into largely black, traditional public schools or distributed fairly equally among traditional public schools.  Rural charter schools' enrollment demographics may also be influenced by pre-existing patterns of student segregation.  In addition, the analysis does not show variations within many states. The maps also do not show related socio-economic conditions such as unemployment rate, household education level, median household income, or low academic achievement that might be correlated with the racial composition or poverty level of student bodies. 

The final set of maps show selected student characteristics of rural charter schools within urbanized, urban clusters, and categories based on local codes (fringe, town, and rural).  In particular, the differences in student poverty rates across these local classification schemes are shown.  Presumably, rural charter schools based on the NCES definition of rural and non-rural status are located outside of urbanized areas and urban clusters.  Interestingly, in these two categories, pockets of rural charter schools are found in both urbanized areas and urban clusters.  This raises challenges pinning down a precise locational context of rural charter schools.  How "rural" are rural charter schools?  What portions of rural charter schools can be considered urban and suburban?  Are rural charter schools locating in spatially contiguous and compact areas as a competitive response from nearby schools struggling to maintain a basic level of enrollment? Or are rural charter schools seeking to locate near preferred clients (less economically disadvantaged and more motivated parents) in order to gain advantage from meeting their needs at lower costs (e.g. transportation, marketing and recruitment, staff and teacher accessibility)?  As charter schools spread in rural areas, they gain the ability to locate their schools anywhere and address the unique educational needs of families in rural areas.  In the case of charter schools that locate in Native-American reservations, the geographic proximity to Native American tribes may be a reflection of the schools' interest in a culturally-driven curriculum.  More location-specific research inquiries are raised below.

1) It is logical to investigate the extent to which rural charter schools classified according to NCES/Census local codes are playing on a level playing field in terms of their access to the teaching staff, extra-curricular activities, and professional development that are essential for meeting the achievement goals required under their performance-based contracts.

2)  Questions remain over the parental demand for charters in the rural areas. What are the characteristics of parents making school choices in rural charters? Are the parents' reasons for choice in rural charters similar to those in urban and suburban charters?  Will the parents' ability and motivation to travel long distances to and from school each day influence the types of students served by rural charter schools?  How do we explain the differences/similarities in the educational decisions made in the three market contexts? 

3)  An educational program that responds to rural contexts (i.e., charter schools that are locally responsive or "placed based curriculum", "ethno-centric") in terms of the natural landscapes, local culture, and values may create a tension in the general school curriculum that prepare students to excel on state tests.  It may be interesting to examine the extent to which rural charter schools classified according to NCES/Census local codes are incorporating placed-based knowledge throughout school curricula vis-à-vis outcome measures such as achievement, graduation rates, student satisfaction, and community satisfaction. 

Future studies of rural charter schools can provide valuable contribution on virtually all of the essential aspects of the charter school reform in rural America.  It is hoped that the foregoing analysis will stimulate questions and encourage discussion and further comprehensive exploration in this area.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Lisa DiGaudio
Founding Board Member, New Dawn Charter High School
Curriculum Coordinator, Lefferts Garden Charter School

In an earlier blog post, I introduced this blog series as a means of talking about how to implement the common core into your curriculum. For immediate reference, I want to point out three sources that I found very helpful when writing the curriculum for Leffert Gardens Charter School:

• The Network of Independent Charter Schools Resource Library entry on Common Core: http://indiecharterschools.org/commoncore.php
• The New York State Education Department: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/common_core_standards/
• The Gates Foundation Common Core Maps: http://commoncore.org/maps/index.php

You can actually purchase additional maps and lessons for all grade levels via the Gates Foundation site; it was $20 well spent!  Not only does the site membership include maps, but in the maps are additional resources that are free of charge. These lessons can fit just about any school curriculum, and they are written by teachers in the field.

Now back to the "how" on implementing the common core. There are two things that must be considered when you start. The first, and probably the most difficult for me, is looking at the standards and figuring out which ones would be most often tested on the State Assessments. The test is changing each year, in an effort to accommodate the push on informational text, yet at the same time, the skills being tested are not consistent like we were accustomed to in the past. When I prepped my students for the New York State ELA exam prior to the change in cut scores (2009-2010 school year), it was easy to go back into the old tests and look at the item analysis provided by the State. I was able to look at each exam, record the performance indicator tested and compare its frequency from year to year. In this way, I could adapt the level of practice I would impose on my students in a variety of ways, from the “one passage” drill, to packets of skill practice and writing within that skill. We don’t have that luxury currently in grades 3-8. The pitfall for me in writing the K-2 curriculum at LGCS is anticipating the level of frequency of the common core standards and the shifts that are required from the state standards year to year. (The state website again is very helpful on this topic, directly addressing the shifts, though basically every school must be fully using CCSS by the 2013-2014 school year.) As I looked over this timeline, I made the decision with my principal, Marc Magnus-Sharpe, that our best bet would be to just jump right into CCSS and implement it fully into our curriculum now. This gives us the entire school year to ready our second graders for the state assessment next year, which will use the CCSS entirely for 2012-2013.

With that determination, the next point is to figure out how to get alignment going in the curriculum. I am going to focus on social studies in this blog entry, mostly because it’s what I used to teach and it’s an easy connection to ELA instruction. The first thing I did for my level of students (grades K-2 right now) is to lay out the topics of study. Our school follows the New York City Department of Education curricular alignments as close as possible, along with a focus on environmental science.  I looked at the curricular units for the grades throughout the school year.  Let’s look at a topic for November in Kindergarten as an exemplar:

Unit of Study for November in Social Studies: Myself and Others

Overarching Question: How are people unique?

Performance indicator: All people share common characteristics (3.1d)

Common Core connection: Read to the children Lon Po Po: A Red Riding Hood Story from China (Ed Young)

Teaching point: Compare and contrast Little Red Riding Hood stories. Have the students make connections on how people from far-away places can have many things in common with us.

Kindergarten students, with assistance, will be able to compare and contrast the attributes of people from China and the United States via Lon Po Po.  This is the intent of common core, using different texts to learn content. It’s important to note that the common core is not a set of standards that spoon feed teaching and learning to students and teachers. It is a framework to take these learning experiences and deepen them for our students. Is it easier for our Kindergartners to learn cultural diversity through a textbook, or by being engaged in a Read Aloud, and then taking that content and applying it to their own classroom? The experience should set the bar for more learning experiences in the future.

This is not the be-all, end-all of how to implement the common core. I hope that this blog will serve as a vehicle to talk about all of the ways that we can not only just teach the standards, but to deeply engage our students in learning experiences that matter. It’s funny, but I just finished reading John Dewey’s Experience and Education (1938!) about that very thing--quality experiences are the basis to learning. Here we are almost 75 years later, and that element--the quality of learning experiences--remains the basis for how our students should learn content.  I look forward to sharing ideas and experiences of my own, as well as learning from and sharing your comments to improve our students’ learning experiences within the Common Core and well beyond it.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Lisa DiGaudio - Founding Board Member, New Dawn Charter School, NYC

One of my favorite activities to partake in the fall is attending the New York State English Council Conference, held at the Desmond Hotel in Albany. The drive up the New York State Thruway, looking at the beautiful foliage, is a great time for renewal and motivation for me. I always find something new to hook into and use.  As a teacher, my first year at the conference, I learned how to use graphic organizers like the Four Square method. For my reluctant writers, this was a revelation for them. As an administrator, I was able to meet other admins from around the state and talk about recruiting and teacher quality and training. All in all, the Desmond is a lovely place to go even when there aren’t conferences happening. The fall weather, the accessibility to downtown Albany, and also a great park, The Crossings, allows you to truly enjoy all that “upstate” living has to offer.

This year my mission was to attend as many sessions on the Common Core as possible. The general vibes from the teachers I had from last year were no different this year. High school teachers were lamenting the death of “literacy,” administrators were skeptical about the implementation of PARCC standards (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness in College and Careers) and if they were actually going to happen, as there is now talk that PARCC standards may actually become “optional” for school districts . With all of this uncertainty, only two things remained clear: High School teachers were thankful for the return of the January regents, and Common Core is an annoyance that will hopefully go away.

As you know from my last blog post on the Common Core, I quite like the common core standards. The interdisciplinary approach gives teachers multiple opportunities to address content in a variety of ways, deepening critical thinking skills. For example, one of the sessions I attended, “Reading Social Studies: The Character Connection” (Louisa Kramer-Vida, Ed.D, C.W. Post University) focused on teaching social studies like we would teach ELA, with “characters.”  By teaching social studies with a “story,” students can make the connections to their studies as they would with a novel in ELA. To me, this is what the Common Core seeks. As I reflected on what I am writing for my own school’s unified curriculum, the goal is to connect our students to the people and places around them.  Instead of creating characters, we want to connect our students to their own community, developing their sense of space from the small to the very large. For older students, connecting them in the same way is equally important.

One of the most emotionally charged portions of the conference was for me hearing Erin Gruwell speak about “teaching hope.” She talked about her work as a classroom teacher in South Central L.A., and the birth of the “Freedom Writers” from her decision to connect her students’ pain to books. The character connection for these students was so clear. Ms. Gruwell built a curriculum of violence and teens for her own students to relate to, as violence was so prevalent in their own lives. By learning how to connect to characters with similar circumstance, and subsequently learn the facts, these students grew emotionally from the experience. I spent the whole lunch hour crying, thinking about the students that New Dawn Charter High School will be recruiting for September, and further realizing that we need to be doing exactly what Ms. Gruwell was doing with her students, giving them hope for something better.

Something else also came out of the Reading Social Studies session, and it was a comment that one of the participants made when we were talking about the differences of teaching from a textbook vs. teaching from a novel. She said, “We forget that literacy is more than just reading fiction.” I thought back to my first methods courses when earning my degree in School Leadership…we learned that in implementing change, buy in takes at the minimum three years for full acceptance. The comment about literacy brought me back to this. This is the second year of the Conference, and last year (Year One I’ll call it in Common Core discussions and implementation) was full of complaints and criticisms. This year, criticisms were still prevalent, but there were more workshops, and fully attended ones, that focused on implementing the common core in the classrooms. The literacy comment connected me to this level of buy-in. Criticism can come from fear and resistance to change in itself. While the common core dictates that by a student’s senior year 70% of their “literary” studies be rooted in informational text, that does not denote the “death” of fiction. One of the biggest differences I found in my own studies at Adelphi University during my freshman year was that most of what I was reading was informational text. I was a history major, and I was studying primary documents on a variety of topics. The fiction I read was in my honors courses, and I hated it! What I would have appreciated from high school was a better way to read non-fiction quickly and efficiently. 

So the take away from the conference? Common Core is definitely here to stay, regardless of what the tests are going to look like. Resources, different thinking, and creativity are required when thinking about implementing the common core. But this isn’t reinventing the wheel. To a certain degree, maybe we have all been a bit complacent when thinking about our lessons and curriculum. Erin Gruwell was a terrific example of what we all should be doing for our students, and I am sure there are many, many teachers out there, doing the same thing, day after day to reach their own at-risk students. If we choose to look at common core as a limit to what we can teach, then we will indeed be limited in what we achieve with our kids. If we choose to look at it as a “do over” in curriculum planning, then we give our own students the chance to have their own “do over” in learning.  In ten years, maybe common core will become of those of buzz words that got retired, like how “differentiated instruction” replaced “tracking.” When we look at curriculum and teaching in a way that includes everyone, there’s no place to go but up, even if it includes the necessary grumbling and extra hours to make it work.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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By Shawn Stelow Griffin, The Finance Project

In late 2009, the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) announced a joint effort to create recommended standards for students in grades K-12 in English language arts and mathematics. Over the past two years, these two prominent national membership organizations have convened experts to write and vet the standards. To date, 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards. Chances are, your state has adopted these standards, and your school must now adjust its curriculum to meet these new standards. Not to worry—there are a number of resources that can support these efforts.

 Resources

In New York, the board of regents adopted the Common Core standards in January 2011. According to a timeline posted on the NY State Education Department website, every teacher should implement at least one unit aligned to the Common Core Standards each semester.[1] The timeline calls for full implementation of the Common Core Standards and aligned assessments by the 2014-2015 school year. The timeline is accessible at: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/common_core_standards/ccstimeline.html.

Teachers and leaders at independent charter schools in New York have two key websites to turn to for information and support:

• The state education department’s Curriculum and Instruction office has a Common Core portal on its website. A Common Core Implementation toolkit of information can be accessed at: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/common_core_standards/toolkit.html. This portal provides copies of the standards themselves, as well as supporting resources such as test exemplars, samples of student work and the research basis of the standards. The toolkit also links to national resources available at the Common Core Standards Initiative website.
• The second New York state resource is the EngageNY website. This website provides support to teachers and administrators in key areas of education reform in the state. Common Core resources on this website include curriculum exemplars, details of instructional shifts, a video series that explain the standards in depth, and the implementation timeline.

For readers outside of New York state, most state departments of education have developed web-based portals of resources to disseminate state priorities for implementation as well resources to assist teachers and administrators in the development of units, lessons, and resources that align to the new English/Language Arts and Mathematics standards. Other states are building resource pages and structures to support the implementation of the Common Core standards in their states. Here is a sampling of web resources from selected states from across the country:

• California: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cc/: for state curriculum documents and a parent guide
• District of Columbia: http://dcps.dc.gov/DCPS/In+the+Classroom/What+Students+Are+Learning/DCPS+Common+Core+State+Standards: for implementation plans and assessment plans
• Illinois: http://www.isbe.net/common_core/default.htm:  for implementation plans as well as assessment transition plans
• Louisiana: http://www.doe.state.la.us/topics/common_core.html: for the state’s implementation plan, information for parents and teachers
• Maryland: http://www.marylandpublicschools.org/MSDE/programs/ccss/?WBCMODE=Presentat%25%25%3e%25%25: for state common core frameworks and other information
• Massachusetts: http://www.doe.mass.edu/candi/commoncore: for state frameworks and a state assessment transition plan
• Maine: http://www.maine.gov/education/lres/commoncore:  standards documents as well as documents detailing the state’s perspective regarding the application of the Common Core for English language learners and students with disabilities
• Michigan: http://www.michigan.gov/mde/0,4615,7-140--232021--,00.html: for assessment transition plans, and grade by grade crosswalks of the Michigan Content Expectations to the Common Core standards

There’s an App for That!

A quick search of the Apple App Store reveals several iPhone and iPad apps designed to support teachers and administrators as they design lessons and units aligned to the Common Core standards. One of the apps, Common Core by Mastery Connect, is available for Android phones as well.

• Map your existing curriculum, materials, units and lessons/activities: Using curriculum and unit maps for your school, overlay current unit topics and curriculum scope to the Common Core Standards. This strategy will give you a clear vision of changes that need to be made in order to meet the scope and sequence of the Common Core. Recalling that New York state has an implementation timeline, needed changes can be addressed purposefully in a way that adheres to the implementation timeline.
• Work hard, and smarter: Independent charter schools are lean organizations, with staff playing multiple roles within the school. Many independent charters become part of collaborative networks in which they share resources and information and, in some cases, staff. Collaborative networks can work in person or using platforms such as Skype and/or Google Docs to co-create units and lessons aligned to the Common Core. Armed with a plan describing the sequence in which curriculum revisions will occur, school leaders can explore the creation of writing teams or other strategies to encourage collaboration and sharing among other independent charter schools.

Check out the blog series on implementing the Common Core at an independent charter schools in New York, written by Lisa DiGaudio, to see how one school is redesigning their curriculum. What other strategies are you exploring to complete the curriculum revision process? What planning frameworks or work management tools are you using to track progress in this effort? How are you sharing new units of study among your faculty and staff? Feel free to post your ideas below to keep the conversation going.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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In my last post on starting a charter school, I rather lengthily talked about writing the full application. The narrative section of the application is one of the most important pieces of the entire process. In New York State, there are information sessions set up for groups looking to submit applications. You can go here http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/documents/NovDecInfosessions.pdf to get the latest information on dates and times for the 2011-2012 cycle of applicants. It would be helpful to review the 2010 and 2011 cycles, which outline the process, and show you how many applicants started the process to how many applicants finished with a NYS Board of Regents approved charter. The guidelines in the kits are strict. Page overages or being under the required pages could end up costing you a spot further along in the process. If you are located outside of New York State (where I am working on our charter application), be sure to take time to review all of the specific guidelines provided by your authorizer.

And don’t forget about the Network of Independent Charter Schools Online Hotline. You can use it ANY TIME, free of charge, to ask questions specific to your charter application process!

After the application narrative is completed, you must spend some time thinking about what attachments you will include to support your narrative.  I’m going to walk through the attachments prepared in the New Dawn full application, which you can find here: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/2011CSFullApplications.html. The first two attachments are standard for the full application. It includes a roster of all the individuals associated with your charter: board members, prospective employees, and community activists. The next is a certification statement that the lead applicant must sign. Those are the “easy” attachments to fill out.

The next attachment is the school schedule. This takes some careful consideration, because you have to think about the needs of your student body and what they will be taking over a period of time. For high schools, the challenge of what new entrants will need vs. a student who needs everything can be tricky. Elementary schools have less struggles with scheduling, just needing to account for scheduling with student/staff projections over the course of the charter. The school calendar must also be included, ensuring the number of days of instruction, along with holidays and school closures are listed over the course of the charter.

The Corporate By-Laws is a legal requirement. The By-laws of your charter establish the name of your school, the mission of the school and the purpose of the charter. This document outlines the roles and responsibilities of the board of trustees. This includes the roles of the board in relation to school governance. Code of Ethics is next.

The next section is dedicated to the proposed employees and board members of the school. With each role, a curriculum vitae is included, which supports the individual’s credentials. This is important, because it provides transparency to the authorizers on the abilities of the team to run a school. The New Dawn applicant group features many talented educators and administrators who have decades of experience with children, managing organizations and designing curriculum for the target cohort of students. Following the credentials of the members, attachments include a Statement of Assurances for each member, along with a signed Request for Information sheet, providing information required on the pages from the charter office. Essentially ,the request for information establishes no conflicts of interest from the board and prospective school employees.

The organization chart is another important component of the attachments. This gives you the opportunity to really think about the structure of accountability and reporting from the student level up to the board of trustees. These relationships establish the basis for school culture and relations within the community with teachers and parents. Following the organization chart is the description of each of the positions listed in the organizational chart. New Dawn chose to have an Executive Director and Principal, so that the Principal would be free to spend time in classrooms and foster a true learning community with feedback regularly taking place in the classroom. The last section is the budget. This shows the fiscal health of the organization and its capacity to serve its students over the life of the charter.

No matter what may be required by your specific Authorizer, these attachments are important, and I would recommend preparing all of them even if they are not legally required by your Authorizer. It shows how the instructional program of the school will be supported through the organization, board of trustees and budget. All of these components demonstrate the health of the organization and the ability to run the school throughout the length of its charter and through renewal to the next charter. Demonstrating sustainability is the key to getting your charter approved.

Next time…preparing for the meeting with your community board.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Shawn Stelow Griffin, The Finance Project

Some argue based on recent policy changes and press coverage that there is a bias towards charter schools run by Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). Based on a new report, those favoring CMO’s on the basis of academic achievement should reconsider their position. The National Study of Charter Management Organization (CMO) Effectiveness: Charter School Management Organizations: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts shows that CMO charter schools are not performing significantly better than their district school, or their independent charter school peers.

The study, co-written by Mathematica and the Center for Reinventing Public Education, took a comprehensive look at student achievement in schools run by 40 CMOs. The study dug into five key “drivers” the study’s authors hypothesized would have the most significant impact on student achievement:

•  An emphasis on school-wide behavior policies;
• Teacher coaching and mentoring;
•  Increased instructional time;
•  Regular use of formative assessment; and
• Performance-based compensation.

The study found that of the drivers only the emphasis on school-wide behavior policies and teacher coaching and mentoring had statistically significant impact on student achievement. 

So What?  

While this study focused on CMO charter schools, there are some takeaways for leaders of independent charter schools. The successful strategies, as is often the case with education reform approaches, can be widely implemented.

Successful Strategies: 

• Comprehensive Behavior Policies—Zero-tolerance policies, behavior codes or specific interventions that offer incentives and clear consequences, engaging parents as partners to manage school and individual student behavior netted an increase both in reading and math scores.
• Expanded Teacher Support and Review—Charter management organizations that conducted frequent review of teacher lesson plans, classroom observation, and teacher mentorship and coaching appear to correlate to increased student achievement.

These two achievement-boosting strategies can be implemented in any charter school, regardless of structure.

Strategies that did not net significant differences:  

• Defining a CMO-wide educational approach and/or curriculum
• Performance-based teacher compensation
• Frequent formative student assessments
•  More hours of annual instruction (there were positive results in math achievement, but its hard to separate this variable from comprehensive behavior policies for causality).

As with the successful strategies, the above strategies, that did not show significant improvement in student achievement, are implemented by district schools and independent charter schools as well as CMOs.

The study’s authors noted that a comparison of successful strategies in independent charter schools as well as CMO charter schools is a future direction they will pursue in their research. It will be interesting to see what the data show in relationship to this question.

What’s the Takeaway?

The data collected in this study support those who posit that without an orderly and safe environment and high-quality challenging instruction; curriculum, testing programs, and time on task do not make a significant positive impact on student achievement. These two variables are within every leader’s ability to control.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

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