Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best

The supply of seats in the nation’s best charter schools is not growing rapidly enough to serve the millions of low-income children who need better schools.  Based on lessons from the fastest growing organizations in other sectors, this report for the Progressive Policy Institute provides breakthrough solutions for growing the best charter schools and charter management organizations. With specific advice for charter sector leaders, policymakers and philanthropists, Going Exponential offers strategies that could enable every child living in poverty to have access to schools as good as today’s top ten percent charter schools by 2025. Recommendations address the major barriers limiting growth of the sector’s best, such as scarcity of excellent school leaders, funding for growth, and motivation of charter leaders to grow while maintaining excellence.

Better Choices: Charter Incubation as a Strategy for Improving the Charter School Sector

High-performing charter schools have shown that disadvantaged students can achieve at high levels. Unfortunately, too few of these schools exist today, severely limiting access among the highest-need students. Charter school incubation – recruiting, selecting, training, and supporting promising leaders as they launch new schools – is a crucial strategy for increasing the number of high-performing charter schools in cities across the country.  This policy brief, released by the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust) and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, explores current experience with charter incubation and the local policies and funding needed to create and sustain healthy markets for successful incubators.

Incubating High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in City-Based Organizations

[pdf] Charter incubation is the process of intentionally building the supply of high-quality schools and charter management organizations by recruiting, selecting, training, and supporting promising leaders as they launch new charter schools. This white paper identifies and analyzes four critical focus areas for charter incubators: attracting and developing effective school or CMO leaders; partnering strategically to help leaders open and operate high-quality charter schools and CMOs; championing school leaders in the community; and coordinating advocacy to support new charter leaders. The authors distilled these four areas from research and discussions with members of the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), an initiative of Indianapolis-based education reform organization The Mind Trust . The white paper discusses these focus areas and presents innovative responses by CEE-Trust members to the challenges of charter incubation in each area. This white paper is part of a three-piece series continuing the discussion from a National Charter School Resource Center / U.S. Department of Education conference exploring emerging city-based movements that embrace high-quality charters as an integral component of their reform strategy. On September 21, 2011, Joe Ableidinger joined Ethan Gray, vice president of The Mind Trust and director of CEE-Trust, to offer a webinar based on the white paper, Expanding the Supply of High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in Incubation, available through the National Charter School Resource Center at http://www.charterschoolcenter.org/webinar/expanding-supply-high-quality-charter-schools-innovations-incubation.

Expanding the Supply of High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in Incubation

This webinar explores charter school incubation, a promising strategy for intentionally accelerating the growth of high-quality charter schools by recruiting, selecting, training, and supporting promising leaders as they launch new schools. Presenters discuss the need for incubation, the promise of incubation, and some of the early evidence from established incubators. They introduce Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), an initiative of Indianapolis-based education reform organization The Mind Trust, and discuss the work that CEE-Trust members have been doing to incubate new high-quality charter schools. The webinar then details four critical focus areas for charter incubators as described in the companion white paper, Incubating High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in City-Based Organizations, and innovative approaches taken by CEE-Trust members in each focus area. Finally, presenters discuss five major policies that policymakers can address to support charter incubation, and how changes in these areas would help incubators.

Developing Education Talent Pipelines for Charter Schools: A Citywide Approach

[pdf] This white paper highlights six indicators of a robust talent pipeline so that charter supporters of all kinds—including charter school leaders, talent providers, charter support organizations, philanthropies, and politicians—can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their own efforts. It also shows through the examples of Indianapolis and New Orleans how charter supporters have been able to grow the supply of effective charter school teachers and leaders by focusing on these indicators. This white paper is part of a three-piece series continuing the discussion from a National Charter School Resource Center / U.S. Department of Education conference exploring emerging city-based movements that embrace high-quality charters as an integral component of their reform strategy.

Developing City-Based Funding Strategies: Investments to Create a Robust Charter Sector

[pdf] Drawing on lessons learned from cities trying to kick-start a new charter market, as well as from some of the most developed markets in the country, this white paper offers guidance for philanthropies on how to invest wisely as part of a city-based strategy. It also identifies potentially high-yield investments in the charter sector. This white paper is part of a three-piece series continuing the discussion from a National Charter School Resource Center / U.S. Department of Education conference exploring emerging city-based movements that embrace high-quality charters as an integral component of their reform strategy.

Leading Approaches to Philanthropic Investment in the Charter Sector: A Scan of Four Cities

Commissioned by Baptist Community Ministries (BCM) in 2010, this report examines how philanthropic organizations in four American cities—Albany, N.Y.; Denver, Colo.; Harlem, N.Y.; and Houston, Tex.—have affected the charter sector. This scan includes information about how a select number of philanthropic organizations in each city developed their investment strategies, made investment decisions, and evaluated the impact their investments are having on public education.

Investing in Charter Schools: A Guide for Donors

[pdf] Charter schooling remains one of the nation’s most promising efforts to produce more excellent public schools, especially for low-income and minority students. Almost 20 years after the first charter school law was passed, however, questions in the sector largely focus now on quality and expansion: How can we help take the best of the charter sector to scale, while at the same time maintaining high standards of quality? Drawing upon the experience of many of the sector’s most active funders, Public Impact prepared this guidebook for The Philanthropy Roundtable to offer a menu of strategies that donors can use to support a high-quality charter school sector, including:

• Building a robust supply of high-quality new schools;
• Priming the teacher and leader pipeline;
• Addressing critical operations challenges;
• Defining and improving quality; and
• Forging charter-friendly public policies.

The guidebook examines these five priorities by describing how current funders are addressing them, providing suggestions for new donors and exploring the next phase of philanthropic support in the charter sector. Excerpts from the report (pdf) also appear in the spring 2009 issue of Philanthropy Magazine.

Charter School Autonomy: A Half-Broken Promise

[pdf] Charter schools across the country, on average, are not enjoying the full autonomy from regulations that apply to typical district schools, autonomy that policymakers and education reformers promised as part of the charter school “bargain” of greater autonomy for strong accountability. This report, conducted for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute by Dana Brinson and Jacob Rosch, examined 100 charter contracts and 26 state charter laws to measure how much freedom charter schools have in fourteen critical areas of operations such as establishing curricula or teacher work rules.

Free to Lead: Autonomy in Highly Successful Charter Schools

Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists

[pdf] In a follow-up to a 2005 report showing that charter schools are significantly under-funded compared to district schools, the authors find that little changed over four years, and charter schools receive nearly 20 percent less funding per pupil than district schools. The report, created in collaboration with researchers Meagan Gatdorff, Larry Maloney, and Jay May, examines FY 2006-07 data from 24 states and Washington, DC in the most comprehensive analysis of charter funding to date. While Public Impact did not carry out the data-gathering for this edition, the firm’s Daniela Doyle led the writing of the cross-state analysis.

Turning Loss into Renewal: Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, and the Miami Experience