National Charter Schools Week is May 7-11

National Charter Schools Week is May 7-11 and we’re happy to take this opportunity to recognize and raise public awareness for charter schools, the academic success of charter school students, and the charter school movement as a whole.
The charter school movement has been growing steadily since the first charter law passed in 1991 in Minnesota. To date, 44 states and D.C. have charter schools, 3.2 million students attend charter schools, there are 7000 public charter schools nationwide receiving $400 million in funding and employing 219,000 charter school teachers.
This year, during National Charter Schools Week, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is highlighting “Change Makers”— these are the teachers, leaders, elected officials, advocates, families, students, and alumni who make up the charter movement. They are encouraging schools and advocates alike to join in the celebration by hosting/attending local rallies, inviting elected officials to classroom visits, and sharing your voice and the voices of “change makers” through blog posts, media outlets, and social media posts.
Get some awesome resources, social templates, and guides here.

Some Shareable Facts!

Looking for ideas on what to post to your social circles? Why not use some of these facts? Or, whether you are a school leader, a teacher, parent, etc., the National Alliance has compiled some specific messaging tailored for you here.

In 2017-18, there are more than 7,000 charter schools. (National Alliance, 2018)
Charter schools serve nearly 3.2 million students in 43 states and D.C. (National Alliance, 2018)
Charter schools serve 6 percent of the 50 million public school students in U.S.
In 2015-16, 67 percent of charter school students identified as students of color, compared to 51 percent of district school students. (CCD)
In 2016-17, 60 percent of charter schools were independently managed and 26 percent were part of a non-profit CMO.
Students in urban charter schools gained an additional 40 days in math and 28 days in reading per year compared to their district school peers—low-income Black and Hispanic students showed even more progress. (CREDO, 2015)
In 2017, 6 of the 10 best high schools were charter schools. (U.S. News, 2017)
According to a nationally representative survey, nearly 80 percent of parents want public school choice. (National Alliance, 2016)
There are more than 5 million additional students who would attend a public charter school if they had access. (PDK, 2017)
47 percent of U.S. adults support public charter schools, 29 percent oppose them, with the rest having no opinion. (EdNext, 2018)

Our team will be following along and featuring some of these National Charter Schools Week activities on our social channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. We invite you to join the conversation as well by using the hashtags #CharterSchoolsWeek and #WeLoveCharterSchools so we can help amplify your voice and the voice of the movement!

California Education Reform: Races Heating Up

As Election Day nears, two races are heating up that could severely impact California education reform efforts. The races represent fights between education reformers and members of the traditional education system. We saw this fight play out four years ago in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. In that race, the reformers backed Marshall Tuck, who formerly headed up the Green Dot Public Charter Schools. The traditionalists supported Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson in his bid for re-election. The race was decided by about four percentage points and ended up costing $24 million between all of the interests involved.
This year, Torlakson is termed out and cannot run again, but Tuck is back again with heavy reformer support. He will face off against Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, who represents the Oakland/Berkley area and is receiving strong support from the traditionalists. Whoever wins the race will be the next Superintendent of Public Instruction and will be in charge of the Department of Education. For our interests this would be a huge deal and could impact hundreds of charter schools throughout the state; touching everything from charter appeals, SB 740 funding determinations, requests from CDE, facility issues and how statutes are interpreted. I expect both sides to spend large amounts of money on this race but it will seem a tiny amount compared to what will be spent on the Governor’s race.
The Governor’s race pits the same two interests against each other with other groups also joining the fray. The latest polling shows Gavin Newsome with a slight edge but there is plenty of time for that to change. The SurveyUSA poll has Gavin Newsom (D) with 21%, followed by Antonio Villaraigosa (D) at 18%, John Cox (R) at 15%, Travis Allen (R) at 10% and John Chiang (D) at 9%. Several other candidates poll between 1% – 3%.
In California, we have a top-two primary so the top two vote-getters will move on to the November general election. The Republicans are assisting John Cox with numerous efforts because they cannot have two Democrats running on the general election ballot for the state’s top office. They are convinced that would suppress Republican turnout throughout the state and hurt many of their congressional candidates in the general election. The reformers are backing Antonio and have already begun funding independent expenditures that will run adds on his behalf.
Reed Hasting, the CEO of NetFlix has donated $7 million and Eli Broad has kicked in $1.5 million to date. The traditionalists have also declared that they will spend as much money as it takes to back Gavin. They will be joined in this effort by other labor unions who view Gavin as more open to their issues than Antonio. While Mayor of Los Angeles, Villaraigosa led a number of education reform efforts and attempted to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District. He eventually gained control of a group of schools that he used to increase student performance and implement his proposals. Marshall Tuck ran these schools for a period of time. So again, this race will have huge ramifications for California education reform efforts and charter schools.
We will update you again on as election day gets even closer and the race becomes more clear.

What sets apart charter school authorizers?

Editor’s note: This post was originally published here by CRPE Reinventing Public Education and written by Robin Lake. After our enlightening discussion with Darlene Chambers, Sr. Vice President for Programs and Services, National Charter Schools Institute, on the vital role charter school authorizers play in the three-legged charter school ‘stool’ (check this out for clarification), we wanted to start diving a bit deeper into each of the three legs. This is an interesting piece on the role of authorizers and what some exceptional ones are doing that sets them apart. We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.

New NACSA Study: Addressing the Need for Evidence in Authorizing

One of the essential features of a charter school, what most distinguishes it from a district school or voucher-receiving school, is that it is “authorized” by a public agent and held accountable for results promised in its performance contract.
When Paul Hill and I first started writing about charter schools, we expected that these “authorizers,” most of them school districts that had never overseen performance effectively, would face a steep learning curve. That was confirmed in a federally funded research project we ran on charter school accountability in the late 1990s. Most authorizers we interviewed told us that they were really only planning on holding charter schools accountable for compliance with state regulations. As long as they stayed out of the newspaper, they would likely be renewed.
Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then. Many charter authorizers have set a high bar for taking a balanced scorecard approach to school accountability (looking at a variety of measures of school and organizational effectiveness), using school visits and classroom observations to inform the renewal process, and more recently, taking innovative approaches to equity questions, like ensuring fair access for students with disabilities or finding thoughtful solutions to reduce instances of suspensions and expulsions. In other words, the best charter authorizers in the country have really been pioneers for performance management in public education.
A new study by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) set out to understand exactly what it was that “cream of the crop” authorizers were doing to distinguish themselves. NACSA carefully gathered data on indicators of authorizer quality: They looked at things like growth rates on test scores, rates of closure (to see if performance contracts were being enforced), fiscal responsibility, and whether quality schools were allowed to expand. They then selected authorizers that oversaw a high-quality “portfolio” of schools and compared them to average authorizers.

NACSA homed in on five authorizers—SUNY, DC Charter School Board, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (Ohio), Massachusetts Board of Education, and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools—and identified a long list of common and distinguishing attributes among them. Most notably, they all:

Exhibit strong leadership by standing firm on high standards for approval and renewal. In other words, they stood up for quality even when it meant politically challenging decisions.
Use expert judgment informed by data to make high-stakes decisions. Authorizing, they said, is not a paint-by-numbers job. The best authorizers deliberate, debate, and build professional knowledge.
Enjoy institutional authority and commitment-free of competing demands and bureaucracy. Obviously, professional expertise and leadership are impossible to maintain if a charter school office is underresourced, lacks real decisionmaking power, or is buried three levels down in an organizational chart.
NACSA also finds that the best authorizers are obsessed with data, have strong relationships with schools and respect their autonomy, are clear about how authorizing decisions affect their annual goals, etc.

Most of the five authorizers profiled are well documented, and it won’t come as big news to most authorizers that leadership, judgement, and authority matter. The report’s main value is in the richness of detail. There is a trove of fine-grained guidance throughout this report on how authorizers can stay focused on their key task: performance management.
Despite the care and caution NACSA took with their report, it didn’t address a series of new realities that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Nationally, charter growth has slowed dramatically. The supply of quality applicants seems to be dwindling, access to facilities and talent are drying up, and political backlash at both the local and national levels is intensifying.
We cannot ignore these realities as we think about what “quality authorizing” is. Ironically, Nashville Public Schools has been at the epicenter of some of the most intense charter politics. Though the schools they have approved are performing very well, a hostile board makes life miserable for existing charters and surely has had a chilling effect on new applicants.
It’s also tough to ignore the fact that charter applications have become more onerous and charter oversight more bureaucratic. Creeping reregulation has surely prevented some number of promising operators from getting off the ground.
And while professional judgment is a necessary element of authorizing, there is always a danger that authorizer hubris about “what works” may unnecessarily limit innovation and the diversity of options for families.
Of course, no single research report can answer every question. The always thoughtful Karega Rausch, NACSA’s VP of research evaluation, makes clear that, 1) their findings are not definitive or causal, and 2) more work is needed to understand which authorizer practices are most related to quality outcomes.
My hope is that more research on charter authorizing will happen soon and will include a broader look at questions like:

The politics of authorizing and how it can be better managed.
Which of NACSA’s recommendations and authorizer application requirements could be eliminated with little cost to quality.
How authorizers can more actively remove barriers to charter growth.
How authorizer portfolios perform (which are strong on quality but weak on growth, etc.). As a member association, NACSA didn’t publish data on the not-so-stellar authorizers, but someone should.

Authorizing is a power that must be used wisely. At this point in the charter movement, authorizers urgently need to know as much as possible to inform their work. And we need to hold them accountable for doing so.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic. Please leave them below.
Charter School Capital is committed to the success of charter schools and has solely focused on funding charter schools since the company’s inception in 2007. Our depth of experience working with charter school leaders and our knowledge of how to address charter school financial and operational needs have allowed us to provide over $1.6 billion in support of 600 charter schools that educate 800,000 students across the country. For more information on how we can help your charter school, contact us!

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CTE and Non-Cognitive Skills: Finding the balance

Editor’s Note: As a parent myself, this topic was of particular interest. I often wonder if our schools are actually teaching non-cognitive skills like grit, perseverance, and work ethic — which I thought were solely my job to lovingly impart at home — alongside the more traditional cognitive skills provided by standard curriculum. I found this article that I thought was an interesting analysis of the state of things as it pertains to both cognitive and non-cognitive learning in the school environment. This article was originally published here on February 16th by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and written by Jessica Poiner. We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational education resources, and how to support charter school growth. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.

Non-cognitive skills are an increasingly popular topic in education. These include capabilities like perseverance, grit, self-efficacy, work ethic, and conscientiousness. Research shows that possessing them can affect both scholastic and life outcomes.
Their popularity and apparent effectiveness have led to calls on schools to pay more attention to these non-cognitive factors. These calls were answered in part by ESSA, which requires states to have an indicator of “school quality or student success” that goes beyond state standardized test scores and graduation rates. Sometimes referred to as the “nonacademic indicator,” the inclusion of this measure in federal requirements opened the door for schools to focus, at least in part, on non-cognitive skills. California’s CORE districts, for example, use a social-emotional learning metric that measures four non-cognitive competencies with student surveys.
But incorporating non-cognitive skills into schools is still quite difficult. Paul Tough, author of the widely-cited How Children Succeed, explained why in a 2016 Atlantic article:
But here’s the problem: For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?
Tough raises an important issue: If we know these skills matter, both in terms of academic achievement and long-term outcomes, then we have a responsibility to make sure that students graduate with a firm grasp of them. But if we don’t know how to teach the capacities effectively, what are we supposed to do?
When I taught high school English, my students and I discussed non-cognitive skills all the time—Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet should have practiced more self-control, Dr. King’s speeches and letters are a great example of self-efficacy and perseverance, and The Cask of Amontilladois a fascinating (albeit disturbing) look at the interplay between a conscientious character and a careless one. But similar to what Tough implied in the Atlantic, I often wondered if my classroom was the best place for students to actually practice these skills. That’s not to say it was impossible; I’m sure a few students improved their teamwork skills during group projects, or their grittiness during our seemingly endless trek through research papers. But overall, a traditional classroom with rows of desks and textbooks and a smart board might not have been the best place for them to exercise their non-cognitive muscles.
But what about non-traditional classroom spaces? Take for instance career and technical education (CTE), which integrates traditional academic subjects with technical, job-specific skills. These programs are typically designed to follow both a state’s academic standards and technical content standards that align to a chosen field and allow for hands-on training and real work experience. So, for CTE students, school isn’t just about the three R’s. It might also involve performing blood tests, interning with a pediatric physical therapy team, working on utility restoration and workplace improvement projects at places like GM, participating in mock trials, or even designing animation and software. Each of these programs puts students into real-world situations that demand the development and use of non-cognitive skills.
These are not the “vo-tech” programs of yesteryear, into which academically struggling students were shoved because their teachers didn’t know what to do with them. Today’s CTE helps students earn associate and bachelor’s degrees and industry-recognized credentials that will place them in good-paying jobs—and they value learning through doing and the development of soft skills, not just the imparting of academic knowledge.
Unfortunately, despite all the research on the positive effects of career and technical education, there seems to be little analysis of whether specific programs cultivate non-cognitive capacities. That’s something that should be remedied soon.
But resources like the Ohio Department of Education’s CTE success stories post shows CTE’s potential in this regard. The student profiles therein evince the mastery of hard, cognitive skills: cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency patient care, sous-vide cooking, and expertise in automotive technology, to name a few. But the stories also show students developing non-cognitive abilities that all children need—grit and self-control, leadership and interpersonal communication skills.
As education stakeholders continue to mull over the best way to teach students non-cognitive skills, offering CTE to more students is an evidence-backed, bipartisan solution that already exists to some degree in the vast majority of states. More rigorous research is needed, but the blend of academic and technical material within these programs offers a great opportunity to teach today’s students cognitive and non-cognitive skills in real-world environments.

What are your thoughts on this topic? We’d love to hear! Share in the comments below.

CHARTER EDtalks: Board Governance- Episode 1, Featuring Darlene Chambers

On this CHARTER EDtalk, Stuart Ellis, Charter School Capital President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Charter School Capital sat down with Darlene Chambers Sr. Vice President for Programs and Services, National Charter Schools Institute to get her insights and perspective on board governance. Below are the video and transcript from this episode.

Janet Johnson (JJ):
Good morning and welcome to CHARTER EDtalk. I’m here with Darlene Chambers, senior vice president of the National Charter Schools Institute and Stewart Ellis, CEO of charter school capital. And we are here to talk about board governance. I’m going to let Stewart lead off with a question for Darlene, who is our expert on board governance.

The Three-Legged Stool Analogy

Stuart Ellis (SE) : Darlene, charter schools have often been referred to as this three legged stool. I’m not really sure why, but I’m hoping that you’ll share it with us. Why is it important that amongst the three legs, no one leg is particularly more important or longer or shorter than the others?
Darlene Chambers:
I first want to set the stage for three legged stool … I’m a farm kid from southern Indiana, originally. And, yes I had to get up at 4:00 AM and milk the cows. And if you’ve been on a farm, there’s a three legged stool and many farmers think, isn’t it unstable — just three legs? And what happens when you tilt onto one and what happens when a leg gets loose? And how do you milk the cows with a three legged stool?
I think the charter school world – to those who don’t work in it, that have not studied it, and that don’t understand it, don’t know who all the stakeholders are, and who all these players are – our framework – for most of us – comes from that traditional district school where we had a district office, we had a cascading of authority between the district office and the individual school (used to that principal at the school), but other than the district office and the school, that was the operation. It was pretty clear. And then along comes this entrepreneurial space. Let’s create something different in education and let’s create a mixture of business, operations, and a variety of stakeholders and take it away from the framework of just the district office and school.

The Three Legs: Authorizers, Governing Board, and Resources

Darlene Chambers (DC): The players in the charter market can be confusing to most because you have the state with the contract – which is the department of Education in most states – and an entity called an authorizer, which is quasi-governmental in the sense that it has to oversee the contract. It has to decide who gets to open, who gets to close and who’s going to be compliant or not. Then you have the governing board.
So I’ve already named one leg of the stool—the authorizer. You’ve got the governing board and it’s the most forgotten about leg of the stool. I’ll go back to that—and that should be it. Your stool should just have two legs, right? Well, of course that’s just not going to work.
Nobody’s going to be able to sit on a two legged stool. You need to have the resources. The resources can be an educational service provider (ESP). Some people call them management companies—and again, that’s one type of educational service provider, so I tend to go to the ESP piece, but it can be the yellow bus company, it could be the food service, it can be the operators of the school, etc. So the authorizer, the board, and the educational service provider – or the resources – are the three legs of the charter school stool.
I want to go back to my farm analogy … so I’m sitting on a stool and milking cows. You’ve got to have good balance, or you’re going to keel right over and you’re going to make a mess and so you check that stool all the time to make sure there’s no one leg loose because it’s very important to have stability.
The Authorizer:
The authorizer can be hot and cold. It can be overly monitoring. It can be under monitoring where literally the authorizer can open a school and say, ‘I’ll see you in five years’, or it can be an authorizer that’s so involved in the school, that the school can’t breathe. Because for that three legs, our promise has been autonomy for accountability. A fine line.
Board Governance:
The second leg of the stool, the board governance. Remember how I said it was the most forgotten piece? I can’t tell you how much I’ve traveled the country this last decade, trying to help people understand charter schools and how to have high performing schools. I ask the board a simple question. Who is the contract with? (Who’s responsible for that school? Who owns that charter?) A lot of people can’t answer. They don’t understand the board’s role. We sometimes forget as board members, that our responsibilities and our accountability tether to the authorizer.
Resources:
A lot of boards just go, OK, I’m going to hire this provider [resource] and string it together to be able to operate my school and then we’ll just sign the contract and I don’t have to worry about it. Not such a good idea. Also, there are authorizers that if you ask them a question, they may or may not know how many third party contracts that board has signed. Are you seeing how the school gets a little wobbly and why we have this picture of a three legged stool to simply help people outside the framework – and in it – the importance of the three players?

The Brutal Facts

SE: As you look at it and are thinking about boards as one of the key legs, how do you see the difference between boards that are driving the school¬ – the operators – to really flourish as opposed to just make it?
DC: There are two words that sometimes disturb me. I don’t know what to do with them because I’m not sure I want them, but I do want them. The board that helps a school flourish is one who confronts brutal facts — and that’s those two words, brutal facts. You better know the brutal facts and you have to put it in a way that has a relationship behind it. Mutual trust, open communication, and brutal facts. It’s also important to evaluate. You must evaluate yourself and you have to evaluate that third party contract in order for the school to flourish. You have to not forget the roles ¬— because it’s so easy as a busy volunteer. Because charter school board members, they’re volunteers, they’re not elected. Maybe in some states they are, but very few, and that these busy volunteers hire a contractor and they go, ‘phew, we don’t have to worry now’. Well, you’re a parent. I’m a parent. What happens when we stop paying attention to the kids? Uh oh, right? You have to be observant, you have to evaluate, you have to have a good dialogue and communication, a good relationship, and you’ve got to confront the brutal facts, good data (not just saying ‘I did it’, but proving that you have metrics) that shows that you’re on target for the goals in the contract.
SE:
As a board member, with all that data information that drives somebody’s logic can you also lead an organization with your heart?
Darlene Chambers:
What a perfect question for the day and time we live in right now, Stuart. It seems like we only want to hear facts. We want a lot of information and the information is almost like bombardment. If you’re selling data now as a as an entity and you’re selling data to traditional districts, data to superintendents, data to teachers, data, data, data, data, which is all about your head, you think there’s this data and this flurry of activity of talking and using your head is enough. It’s good. But if you ever separate from your heart, you’re going to forget why you even volunteer. You’re going to forget why charter schools even exist, which has a lot to do with the heart. The heart has got to do with the people side of the equation and I think it’s a fine balance between the two. If it’s just hard cold data and no heart, I would say walk away from it. I think, for the community, the parents, the kids, other fellow board members, it’s a blend of using your expertise, listening to others, and evaluating the hard cold facts (which is called reality) with your intuition, with your innate love of education or children in general that will help pick the right facts, will use the right data. Now, let me also say that if you’re a good time person, you like to hug. It’s all about a smile. You want to be everybody’s friend. You want everybody to love you and you disregard the facts that ain’t gonna work either. So it is a fine balance between the head and the heart. And if I can’t sense that there’s a heart behind someone’s conversation with me, pretty much I’ll just walk away and won’t return. I’ve got to have some heart and I’ve got to feel it and I appreciate a person that has both.
JJ: And so with discussions of brutal facts and big hearts we’d like to thank Stuart and Darlene so much for being a part of this Charter EDtalk talk with us.
DC: I’d just like to close with this. If anybody’s interested in volunteering, but they don’t want to run for an office – they don’t want to go through that – but they believe in kids. They believe in families, and they want to engage in the community. Look around you. There might be a charter school out there that could use your expertise. Whether it’s Charter School Capital, or whether it’s the National Charter School Institute, we would be glad to connect you to a charter school where you could use your head and your heart. We need you.
JJ: Thanks.
SE: Thank you.

SHARING OUR VALUES: TEAMWORK

At Charter School Capital, we hold each other accountable to core company values as the driving force and foundation of what we do. These values are our guiding principles as we work together to more effectively support the growth and development of our charter school partners. And, as a result, Charter School Capital is a proven catalyst for charter school growth. In CSC’s ten years, we very proud to say that we’ve helped finance the education of more than 800,000 students in over 600 charter schools across the United States.
We measure everything we do by these core values:
• Best-in-Class
• Empowerment
• Innovation
• Teamwork
• Accountability
In this blog series, we wanted to spotlight how all of us at CSC work to exemplify these core values. For this, the third post of the series, we’ll dive deeper into what teamwork means to us and how we embody and reflect this goal both internally and what that means for our charter school partners.
Teamwork seems to be at the core of everything we do here at CSC. Each team relies on each other to support our charter school partners in their success.

A culture of teamwork

To get some expert insight into how we strive to live up to the value of teamwork, I was pleased to sit down with Marci Phee, Client Services Director here at Charter School Capital. Once a school comes on board with us, Marci’s team ensures that the funding is working for the school in the way that they want it to; that they’re getting their funding, assistance, and support on time; and that our team is available to help the school with whatever needs they may have.
Marci – selected by CSC leadership as the embodiment of the value of teamwork here at CSC – has been with Charter School Capital for three years, and has been key in building our team culture. One of her early missions was to help her team build a deep but practical understanding of the value gained from partnering with other teams across the organization and how working as a team would help us better achieve our goals.
Sitting down with Marci, I was curious to know:
• How one goes about building a high-performing team
• How teamwork helps us directly support our clients
• How being passionate about our mission plays into our value of teamwork
• What actionable things that we do to support teamwork

A shared vision

I began our conversation by asking Marci how the team stays on course to do what is in the best interest of the company and our schools. And her immediate response was all about the shared vision – or the collective understanding of the direction we’re all headed—and it’s all about how we serve our customers.
“For our team to work well together, the first step is for everyone to understand where we’re all going. That means when we bring a school on board and commit to funding that school, we’re all in. Everyone knows that the goal is not just to deliver funding, it’s to deliver what each school needs or wants, whether that is a renovated gym or some operational help to get through the end of the school year.
When we commit and say, ‘yes, we’ll provide that funding,’ what we’re really saying is, ‘yes, we will get you where you want to go.’ And every member of our team—whether it’s underwriting or finance or the executives or the account managers—knows what the end goal is. That’s where we’re going. A common goal makes it much easier to work together as a team.”

A dedicated team

One of the things I’ve come to understand in my few months here at CSC– that perhaps makes us a bit different than others in our industry – is the comprehensive team of finance professionals we put in place to work with every single one of our school partners. This knowledgeable, dedicated team works together with our schools to find sustainable solutions to ensure that they succeed in the near term and as they grow. I wanted to ask Marci to clarify how that team is assembled and how they create the framework that helps them work together in the best interest of our school partners.
“Every school in our portfolio has essentially three charter school capital members who are assigned to their account and know it very well. Very, very well. There’s always a primary point of contact who will be the dedicated account manager. That is the one person you can always call. That’s just part of a core, client-facing team that includes the account manager, a financial analyst, and an underwriter. If something comes up and the school needs a different financing option, or they have questions regarding corporate structure or education, they know that their team will support them. This is the case throughout the life of our clients, even as their financial needs change.”

The three C’s

Marci shares, more specifically, how this multi-faceted team structure works so effectively. It comes down to three words: Cooperation, Collaboration, and Communication – the three C’s.
“Because there’s an assigned team that is responsible for knowing the school, it just makes it easier to cooperate. Everyone knows who their partner is cross-functionally. And, from a collaboration standpoint, everybody has the same goal and everybody’s willing to help and have open lines of communication. People here show up to meetings, are responsive to emails, have informal text messages, just walk by and say, ‘Hey, I need your help.’ We share at water cooler conversations, joint coffee runs, and chats riding up in the elevator—and all of that pieces together to deliver the best product in partnership to the school.”

Grit, Creativity, Partnership

Marci has built a high-performing team of people who are dedicated, hard-working, and are master collaborators. I wanted to know what characteristics she looks for when building a team, and what qualities she thinks makes a great team player.
And, her first, out-of-the-gate response was “Grit. It’s that ‘never die’ mentality. There has to be a solution. There has to be a way. There’s always a way. I need that creativity and creative problem solving in each of my team members.”
This immediately reminded me of our interview with John Caughie on the value of innovation here at CSC and how it’s one of the reasons we’re different. We see solutions where other financial institutions may see red flags. We pride ourselves on supporting team members to find those innovative, creative solutions our schools need to be successful and sustainable.
And, in addition to grit and creativity, Marci was clear that having an “inclination towards partnership” was also key. I asked her to explain what she meant by that.
“It’s really important that our dedicated account managers partner with the school’s business, with the school’s goals. If I stop an account manager in the hallway and ask, ‘What is the objective for X, Y, Z charter school for the year?’ they need to be able to articulate exactly what it is. This is not about money, this is about partnering with the school to understand what they’re trying to achieve. And then it’s our job to provide the tools and resources to help them get there. But you can only do that through a true partnership. You have to establish trust and work as a team, with the client. So, I need that inclination towards partnership to really stand alongside our school leaders and decision makers and get them where they want to go, day in and day out.

It’s all about the students

A shared vision, a dedicated team of professionals, and student focus are all vital to our embodiment of the teamwork value. But all that would mean nothing if we didn’t truly love partnering with our schools and the students they’re educating.
Marci explains, “In the three years I’ve done this, our efforts have always tied to a student outcome in some way. When you understand student success as an organization, and your team understands that student success is the heartbeat of our organization, and we partner with the school and they understand how we feel about student success, and everybody’s on the same page, it’s just more efficient. There’s a lot more trust, and honestly, it’s a lot more fun!
One of our favorite things to do is to go to the school. You are just very happy to see the client and it’s even better when you get to tour the schools and meet the students and see what our funding has done to help them move forward. Or you’re standing there with the school leaders on a big plot of land and they’re saying ‘This is going to be a performing arts center,’ you get to stand there with them and say, ‘yeah, that’s going to be so great.’”

Teamwork does make the dream work

So, it’s clear that we have a mission-driven dedicated team, who cooperate, collaborate, and communicate, but I must conclude this post with the one single thing that is the heart and soul of everything we do—the students.
“One of our driving metrics of students served. I haven’t encountered a single school relationship where the ask for the funding or the need for the funding was not somehow tied to better serving their existing students or to serve more students in the community. Our focus is always on the needs of the school and we will adjust our product based on that need—and that need is always tied to a student. Always.” shares Marci.
What I’ve really taken away from my energizing chat with Marci, is that teamwork really does make the dream work here. I know, such a cliché. But it’s true! Because of our internal investment in teamwork and a shared vision – where we always have the students at the forefront – we’re able to support schools when and how they need it, and work as a team with charter school leaders to make their dreams for their schools happen.

Conclusion

The positivity and chemistry of the entire CSC team is both motivational and inspirational. I love that I have the honor to be part – even a small one – of such a mission-driven, team-focused group of professionals.

California Charter Schools: Legislative Proposals

April 11th

On April 11th a number of different proposals for California charter schools will be heard in the legislature that could impact charter schools. This is just the first policy committee hearing for these bills and they will next have to pass through a fiscal committee before going to the floor of the Assembly or Senate. Here are the bills and a brief description of each one. The ABs are being heard in the Assembly Education Committee and the SB will be heard in the Senate Education Committee.
AB 1871 by Assemblyman Bonta would require a charter school to provide each needy pupil with one nutritionally adequate free or reduced-price meal during each school day.
AB 2289 by Assemblywoman Weber would create an additional type of excused absence for parenting teens at charter schools and traditional schools.
AB 3167 by Assemblyman O’Donnell would establish the Charter Authorizers Regional Support Network Program, to be administered by the Alameda County Office of Education, as an initiative to expand uniform charter authorizing and oversight practices, as provided. The bill would authorize the Alameda County Office of Education to expend up to $30,000,000, upon appropriation from the General Fund by the Legislature, for purposes of the program. The bill would require the Alameda County Office of Education to, among other things, award grant funds to 11 regional lead county offices of education to be used to improve the quality of school district and county of office of education charter school authorizing activity.
SB 837 by Senator Dodd creates a transitional kindergarten program in California. It phases in all four-year-olds but says by 2022-2023 they should all be attending a transitional kindergarten program at a traditional or charter school.
To view any of these measures go to https://www.legislature.ca.gov and hit the bill link at the top left of the page, then place in the bill number.

Career and Technical Education in High School: Does It Improve Student Outcomes?

Editors Note: We wanted to learn more about how – if at all – career and technical educations in high school improved student outcomes and found this informative study. It was originally published here by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute on April 7, 2016. We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational resources, and how to support charter school growth. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable.

Fordham’s latest study, by the University of Connecticut’s Shaun M. Dougherty, uses data from Arkansas to explore whether students benefit from CTE coursework—and, more specifically, from focused sequences of CTE courses aligned to certain industries. The study also describes the current landscape, including which students are taking CTE courses, how many courses they’re taking, and which ones.
Key findings include:

Students with greater exposure to CTE are more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in a two-year college, be employed, and earn higher wages.
CTE is not a path away from college: Students taking more CTE classes are just as likely to pursue a four-year degree as their peers.
Students who focus their CTE coursework are more likely to graduate high school by twenty-one percentage points compared to otherwise similar students (and they see a positive impact on other outcomes as well).
CTE provides the greatest boost to the kids who need it most—boys, and students from low-income families.

Due to many decades of neglect and stigma against old-school “vo-tech,” high-quality CTE is not a meaningful part of the high school experience of millions of American students. It’s time to change that.

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