Community-Centered Charter School Authorizing and School District Authorizers
By Alex Medler
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) recently launched a campaign to promote “community-centered charter school authorizing.” This month, NACSA’s Executive Director, Karega Rausch, joined Colorado authorizers via zoom to discuss the initiative. I recommend the video to all those who were not able to participate. You can review the session here, and read more about the approach here.
Community-centered authorizing has the potential to help improve authorizing in Colorado and if done carefully, it could make education better for everyone. But this is not a simple idea and its implementation raises important questions. After hearing from Rausch, I suspect the concept will be a bit of a Rorschach Test, with different interpretations of what it implies.
NACSA’s concept includes six guiding principles:
- Communities have great ideas about their kids’ educational aspirations and needs.
- All communities — including those that have been neglected for decades — have important untapped assets.
- Families know their children best, including what learning environments will work for them.
- Sustainable growth and effective, innovative ideas about what schools are and can do for students will come largely from neighborhoods where students live.
- Acting on the aspirations and needs of local communities will require fresh thinking and action, inclusive of and beyond typical charter schooling and authorizing practices.
- Investments in policy, practice, and human capital are necessary to deliver on all good ideas communities have for educating their children.
Many district leaders would assert that the local school board itself represents or is the best proxy for “the community.” NACSA suggests that a community-centered approach would be more deeply embedded in the community. A community-centered approach would find ways to incorporate and reflect the views and desires of more people and groups that may not currently feel they are part of district decision-making. The pursuit of more community engagement in district decision-making is hardly limited to authorizing functions. District debates and school board campaigns often turn precisely on how well school board members and districts reflect and serve their communities. These broader district efforts provide lessons and experience to leverage, but also illustrate how hard it is to do this work.
Rausch emphasizes the opportunity of leveraging local assets and partnering with people in the community on creative solutions that reflect local desires. In this way, community-centered authorizing is a pro-active and positive approach to doing new things. NACSA’s materials recommend removing obstacles and supporting charter applicant founding groups and charter schools that reflect a community-centered orientation. District authorizers are divided on whether it is their job to promote more charter applicants — of any type.
Districts would also have to decide what to do when they find that a charter applicant or currently-operating charter school is not community centered. Rausch suggests that authorizers should assess and address a lack of community-centeredness, though deciding what to do depends on the context.
District leaders frequently express frustration when a charter school’s enrollment does not reflect all the students in the surrounding neighborhood. NACSA remains opposed to strict proportional enrollment requirements for different student populations; but Rausch expressed concern about schools that dramatically under-enroll some populations. And having a community-centered approach is no guarantee that a school is designed to, capable of, or interested in serving all students. Many charters are created specifically to provide a safe and nurturing place that focuses on a particular group of students and their needs. The sector is full of interesting examples, from all-girls or all-boys schools, to schools focusing on students with disabilities, and Afro-centric academies. These issues defy simple solutions.
When it comes to acting on these challenges, authorizers often feel that state policy ties their hands. Charter laws can limit the things authorizers can ask, what they can hold a school accountable for, and how they can influence practices or encourage change. For example, after failures come to light, Colorado districts have tried to get schools to improve practices for special populations. Every community includes students with disabilities, and a school cannot serve its community well if it does not meet these students’ needs. Charter schools challenge such efforts and argue districts do not have the authority to insist on necessary changes. If an authorizers’ only remedies to problematic situations are revocation or non-renewal, and a school is strong in some areas while woefully inadequate in others, the authorizers’ ability to insist a school address a shortcoming can be a struggle. If authorizers are to support greater community-centeredness, for both new and existing schools, they may need changes in policy, as well as additional tools and support.
Also consider the questions that arise when a group from outside the area or the state proposes a new charter school. How are authorizers to evaluate the community-centeredness of such applicants? Should they be able to insist on strong independent local governing boards that include authentic representation of the local community? How would they do so? And if they rejected a proposal on this basis, would it be sustained during an appeal? And most importantly, if districts could reject applicants that were not community-centered, would it help local kids?
There likely to be trade-offs between a school’s community-centered strength and other areas of institutional capacity? After all, many high-capacity charter school operators with limited community ties have nonetheless created highly-successful schools that serve their new community very well. How should authorizers navigate and balance such considerations, and how can they minimize trade-offs while ensuring that all schools are strong?
Colorado authorizers should engage with NACSA and consider these and other questions. There is likely to be broad support for community-centered charter schooling, as well as plenty of discussion about what it means and how to get there. CACSA looks forward to exploring these issues further.