Your Ultimate Digital Marketing for Charter Schools Guide is here!

Scratching your head as to how to go about implementing digital marketing for your charter school? You’re not alone!
You probably already know that having a digital marketing strategy is important for raising awareness, fundraising, meeting your enrollment targets, and creating a network of champions that will nurture your school over the long term. The goal of digital marketing is to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time—and in a meaningful way. It sounds simple, but it takes a surprising amount of strategy.
Because we understand that it can feel like a daunting task in your already-busy schedule, we wanted to help take the guesswork out of digital marketing and support you with the tools you need for success! In this power-packed, 57-page workbook, you’ll get the ins and outs of refining your school’s message, setting strategic marketing goals, and achieving them through a variety of digital marketing programs.
We truly set out to make it as straightforward as possible for you build and follow through on a simple digital marketing strategy that will help your school achieve its goals.
In it we cover:

Setting your marketing goals
Determining your audience
Understanding your differentiators
Messaging and positioning
Marketing tactics
Managing and optimizing your school’s website
Paid media
Social media
Email marketing
Handy worksheets
… and much, much, more!

Digital Marketing for Charter Schools: An Actionable Workbook to Help You Achieve Your School’s Goals!
This, our most recent guide will be your go-to guide for all of your school’s digital marketing needs! This manual will help you get your marketing plans started, guide you as you define your audience, differentiators, pick your tactics, and start to build your campaigns.

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Our 2018 Charter School Honor Roll List is Here!

Charter schools help create educational choice. That’s why Charter School Capital only works with charter schools – we believe in the power of charter schools and their leaders to deliver quality education. We wanted to celebrate the achievements of exceptional charter schools across the country, so we’ve launched our Charter School Capital Honor Roll 2018 and started our inaugural year by honoring some of the exceptional charter schools in the beautiful state of Arizona! Learn more about Arizona charter schools here.

ABOUT THE HONOR ROLL

The Charter School Honor Roll is a celebration of charter schools with high growth, student achievement, or community service. Honor Roll schools are awarded a special gift, free admission for one to the Southwest Charter Convention, and will be honored at an exclusive dinner at the September event.
We’re very excited to share the incredible schools that have been selected for the 2018 Arizona Honor Roll. Did you make the list? Curious who did? Would you like to nominate a school for 2019?

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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 support your charter school, contact us!

Charter School Capital Funding Supports Provisional Accelerated Learning Center’s Success

In this School Spotlight, we share how Charter School Capital funding helped Provisional Accelerated Learning Center (PAL) become financially solvent. Read this full case study to learn more about PAL and how they partnered with Charter School Capital to fill funding gaps.

In the mid-1980s, San Bernardino’s traditional public high schools were suffering a dropout rate of 40-50%. The system was failing. The community was in desperate need of help, and The Provisional Accelerated Learning (PAL) Center opened to provide a new path.
Understanding how critical a strong education is to success, The PAL Center began as a not-for-profit tutorial program in 1984 to help those students most at-risk. As the program expanded, it evolved into a charter school that now serves approximately 700 students. The PAL Center welcomes students in grades 9–12 hoping to earn their diploma as well as 19– 21-year-olds seeking job skills training and career placement assistance.
“We’re all about giving young people a second start in life,” says Lawrence T. Hampton, chief financial officer for The PAL Center. “We have specialized in working with students who have been the hardest to serve.” Though designed to focus on those students most in-need, Hampton notes an interesting trend that has occurred in recent years.
“We’re becoming more of a school of choice. When we first started, we strictly took those students that were headed toward dropout,” he explains. But in the late 2000s, “we started seeing more incoming freshmen choosing to come to school here instead of being referred… So it’s been fun to watch that transition.”
The reasons The PAL Center has grown from a school of last resort to the first choice for so many are the non-traditional benefits it offers students.
The school operates from 7:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. four days a week, providing students with the open schedule many of them need to hold jobs or help with their families. In addition, the school is located just outside of the city in a quiet area surrounded by mountains. This picturesque setting helps encourage calm and focus.
Finally, class sizes average around 21 students, helping teachers provide more personal attention than students would receive at other area high schools where class sizes are larger.
Despite the school’s successful track record, Hampton has had to manage challenges threatening The PAL Center’s existence. Deferrals of state payments in California forced the school to tap into its savings, which proved to be insufficient as the deferrals increased. The school also obtained a credit line, but it quickly ran out. School administrators – having made a promise to the students and families of San Bernardino – needed to find a more permanent solution.
The PAL Center’s accountant referred the school to Charter School Capital for funding. Within a few weeks, the two organizations began a long-term relationship that at times has been a lifeline to the school.

“The relationship has allowed us to stay financially solvent, and I can honestly say without that we would’ve been out of the charter school business,” says Hampton. “This school would have folded.”

“They have taken a personal interest in seeing us survive, and that comes through quickly when you’re talking to them. It’s more than just business, and I’m grateful for them.”

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 receivable sales will benefit your charter school, contact us!

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CHARTER EDtalk: Email Marketing for Charter Schools

On this CHARTER EDtalk, Stephanie Ristow, Sr. Marketing Programs Manager at Charter School Capital and Janet Johnson, CMO at Charter School Capital sat down with Michael Barbur, SVP, and Chief Creative Officer at Godfrey to get his insights, expertise, and perspective on email marketing for charter schools. Below are the video and transcript from this informative episode.

Janet Johnson (JJ): Hi everyone, welcome to Charter EDtalks today. I’m honored to be speaking with Michael Barber. He has been a digital marketing guru for many – including working with Charter School Capital– for many, many years. Welcome. And, Stephanie Ristow, who is leading up all of our digital Demand Gen efforts at Charter School Capital. So, if you’re seeing this, it’s probably as a result of Stephanie’s work. We’re going to be talking about email marketing today for charter schools. So, Stephanie and Michael Take it away.
Stephanie Ristow (SR): To get us started, let’s begin with the obvious question. Does email marketing still work, and why?
Michael Barber (MB): It works really, really well. I mean, no matter where you look across the research studies, we continue to see that consumers, regardless of audiences, regardless of industries, this continues to be a channel that they gravitate towards.
Adobe has probably done the most work around this channel in terms of research and consumption habits. And, for the past five or six years, they’ve put into the market a really, really good study on email consumer behavior. And, year over year over year continues to show that email is still the number one revenue generator for organizations and it is still the channel that brands are going to be using to push out content to consumers, or to their constituents, or their audiences. It’s still the place they say they want to receive that message from. Now, on the why. This one’s an interesting question. I think personally, there’s a lot of research out there that’s looking at the why of this, but I think it’s got to do with everything that consumers are being faced with in terms of choices of where they’re participating online.
They’re getting bombarded by Facebook, bombarded by Instagram, Twitter. You look at what’s happening from a geopolitical perspective right now, and the inbox is the one place that everyone understands. It’s been largely the same for the last 25 years, if you will, since Hotmail came out in 1986. So, they don’t have to get accustomed to the Facebook newsfeed changing or wonder how they post a story on Instagram … reply, forward, reply to all, contact lists. They’re largely the same as they’ve been since the beginning of email. So, it’s a place where people are really comfortable.
SR: It all totally makes sense. So specifically, when we’re looking at charter schools, how should they be using email marketing?
MB: I would say, not for students, anybody under the age of 18, unless they’ve got a very specific reason to have an email, like an Amazon account or they signed up for one of these social networks using email. They probably don’t even have one unless they’ve been required to by their school, which you do see some high schools require students to have email addresses, but it really just depends on the school. So, this is a marketing channel that you’re going to want to use for parents. You’re going to want to use it for potential board members, for community and government involvement with your school. For all of those constituent groups that surround your students. So those are the audiences that likely have an inbox if not multiple email addresses. That’s the place you’re going to want to use email when it comes to charters. Largely for all the audiences that surround the students in the cause you’re trying to bring forward.
SR: That makes sense. So, I know for a lot of these charter schools, they want to know which tools – which platforms– they should be using from a thousand-foot level (like if they have the budget) and then at a grassroots level, what realistically makes sense for them.
MB: So, a thousand-foot level just really depends on how you want to use email from a tactical perspective—from a marketing perspective. A lot of the turnkey student enrollment platforms, especially as you’re maturing as a school, will have some sort of email marketing component built into their platform. So that can be used for student enrollment activities, or for letting people know what’s happening at the school on a weekly basis. What activities are students participating in, what do parents need to know on any given week, month or year, if you will? Most of them have really robust toolsets built into their platform so that you can utilize them as a sort of 360 solution or an all in one solution.
At a grassroots effort if you’re just starting up and you’ve got no budget, and no time, and no energy… Almost all the really great platforms that are out there offer some sort of either free or sponsored model around their platform. For the sake of example, MailChimp is a great one to use. If you have under 5,000 subscribers, they will allow you to use the platform for free as long as their little logo can be at the bottom of your email footer. There are multiple platforms that are out there (Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, Emma) that do the same sort of monetization model that aren’t going to charge a lot for a small subscriber base. Now, as you get more sophisticated, those platforms have got be able to grow with you and as you add more subscribers, you’re probably going to be having to pay for that email service provider. That being said, not a huge expense, even at 10, 20, or 30,000 contacts. If you’re not doing significant activities around the platform, you’re probably getting away with something under the neighborhood of say, $100 per month. But as you get more sophisticated, these platforms get more expensive and there’s certainly more platforms out there that you could do a lot more with as you mature as a school.
SR: There are definitely some folks out there that haven’t used an email platform before and might not understand the benefits of it. What’s the benefit of say a MailChimp over a just using thousand-person BCC line? Cause I’ve seen it before.
MB: This is a really good question. This comes down to really two things, one—deliverability. When you’re BCC-ing a thousand people, if someone marks your email address – your @charter school’s domain or whatever your domain is – as spam, that reflects against your domain really heavily. And the last thing you want to do is compromise the deliverability of just your normal day to day, professional ‘to’ and ‘from’ emails getting characterized as spam. So, having an email service provider gives you some layer of protection from that deliverability perspective.
The second big piece of this is just all the data that goes around these users and these contacts. Any one of these email service providers, whether it’s Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, Emma or the like … or anyone of the hundreds that are out there, allow you to build data profiles around individual email addresses—from what’s her first name and last name—so that you can do some personalization inside of that email campaign. It allows you to segment groups. So, let’s say you’ve got grades one through five. You can segment your parents – or whoever is in those lists – by where their students are at so that you can target those communications really well. Also, it’s a lot easier to manage those communications. If somebody unsubscribes, the provider deals with that unsubscribe for you. You don’t have to manage your list that way. There are a lot of benefits that get you so many better features than just having a thousand people on a BCC list.
[Everyone laughs]
SR: We laugh, but I’ve seen it.
MB: One of the most important things that schools can do is build their brand, right? What does the school stand for? And how do you bring that to life visually through your logo and your identity and your colors and your fonts? And, certainly designing an email inside of Outlook or Gmail is not great. You know you can only do so much. You want to have an email that looks great, regardless of whether you’ve got a parent that’s on a phone or whether they’re on a Mac, right? Then all of those email service writers will help you create templates that’ll look great, that will work for your brand, that will build that brand identity for you. There are any number of key features – going outside of Outlook or Gmail or wherever you’re doing that thousand-person BCC list – that you’ll get from an email service provider like MailChimp.
SR: I totally agree. And one more bonus question for you, because I think we have the time. I know often when we talk to these schools, they’re like, great, I want to do email, but how do I start my list? How do I create the list to send to people? I know that that’s a gorilla of a question, but in a 30-second clip, what do you think you’d say there?
MB: The first thing is to make sure you’ve got your data cleaned up. So, you’re not going to want to import what we would call a ‘dirty list’ of old subscribers or parents that aren’t part of the school anymore. The second thing is, is there’s a couple of key campaigns that you want to try and set up if you can and have the bandwidth. Your “Welcome” series – which is the first email that someone receives when they subscribe – is by far the most important email you’re going to work on because you want people to get that right away.
Beyond that make sure the data’s clean and test your campaigns. Always makes sure – before you send out that first campaign – to have a group of subscribers (could be a parent, a teacher, it could be admin individuals or a group of people that you trust) to send out a test so they can see what your emails are going to look like and then you get a little bit warmed up to actually having to hit that send button and send to hundreds – or thousands – of people.
SR: I would like to make one more plug. If you want additional resources on how to get those leads in the first place or some of the tools and platforms that Michael talked about. We have those on our site. Just go to our Charter School Capital resources page.
MB: Thank you, Stephanie.
SR: Thank you, Michael!
JJ: Michael, we can’t thank you enough for coming and being here with us today. We really appreciate all that you’ve done for us. For sure.
MB: My pleasure. Thank you.
JJ: Thank you, Steph. Thanks, Michael. And, thank you for showing up for Charter EDtalk.

Watch our Webinar On-Demand: Digital Marketing for Charter Schools

If you want to up your digital marketing game for your school, you can watch this informative webinar at your own pace and on your own time! Charter school growth requires solid student enrollment and retention programs that position schools for future replication or program growth. Having at least some digital marketing prowess can help you reach and exceed your school’s growth and/or expansion goals.

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Sharing Charter School Capital’s Values: Accountability

Sharing our Values

At Charter School Capital (CSC), accountability is key. 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 final post of the series, we’ll dive deeper into what accountability means to us and how we embody and reflect this goal both internally and what that means for our charter school partners.
To get some expert insight into how we strive to live up to the value of accountability, I was looking forward to sitting down with Matt Percin, Manager of Financial Analysis and Risk here at Charter School Capital. Matt is part of our finance team who are responsible for two key things:

Building out valuation models
Financial analyses

For each school we’re working with, our team looks at their entire financial situation in order to provide the tailored support they need. If we find any potential issues or gaps in their cash flow where they may need support, we then help those schools figure out exactly where the problems are—and even build out plans for them—to show them how to support their stability and growth.
Matt– selected by CSC leadership as the embodiment of the value of accountability here at CSC – has been with Charter School Capital for five years, starting as a Financial Analyst, then moving up to Sr. Financial Analyst, and most recently he’s been promoted to be the manager for the Finance and Risk team.
Sitting down with Matt I was curious to know:
• How having accountability adds value to our teams
• How accountability helps us directly support our clients
• How our culture of accountability builds trust
• If accountability helps us be more invested in our mission

How does having accountability add value to our organization?

In this series about Charter School Capital’s values, we’ve spoken about empowerment, being best-in-class, teamwork, and innovation. All of those values seemed pretty straight-forward as to how they impact our daily work and add value to our company. I’m not sure why, but accountability seemed a little more nebulous to me. I directly asked Matt that question. Why is accountability one of our values and how does he think it impacts our organization?
“Accountability is important as an internal value here. We’re trying to serve a specific population in the education space. And, a lot of what we do in the financial realm is pretty technical. So we’d definitely have to hold each other accountable for all things—both the good things and even the mistakes.
You have to own your own work because, like with any organization, everything you’re producing always flows to somebody else. So always being able to take accountability for whatever you’re producing is very important… it’s actually vital to hold yourself accountable or even hold somebody else accountable—even though sometimes it’s difficult.
That’s how people actually learn. And there’s always some type of coaching or learning moment that comes out of a mistake. There are always things here that pop up – and it might be one little thing that nobody would notice. But if you can figure it out and then share it with the people around you (that have a similar role) everybody benefits.“

It’s all about our clients

If it seems like a broken record, apologies, but the fact remains—we care about the success of our school partners. In other words, we take accountability for their sustainability, growth, and longevity. I asked Matt his thoughts on how we best serve our clients and support their mission.
“We’re always going above and beyond, but I think accountability is also about being creative and figuring out new strategies to help clients. There’s a lot of schools that have very unique situations. We understand the intricacies of the charter school movement and over time, have gained a lot of experience. We continually strive to get better at being able to adapt quickly for new problems.
Sometimes clients come to us asking for something we’ve never done before and so we may not even know what that solution is when first approached. But all of a sudden, we get a team of people that just start researching and trying to figure out how to solve the problem. Figuring out how to accelerate the most capital possible for clients while they’re growing adds a lot of value because they can keep ramping up and serving more kids in the community and building out their mission.”

Accountability=Trust

Our clients trust us to go the extra mile. At CSC all arrows point to the fact that we take the time and care to build relationships with our school partners. Every team member on each account feels responsible for the school’s success and ownership for their part of the equation. By having this team of dedicated professionals who connect with school leaders in this way, trust is a natural – and happy – consequence. I asked Matt about what trust means both internally and externally with our clients and how that ties into being accountable.
“I think there’s a lot of trust in our organization. And it stems from the top down. Everything needs to start with the leadership for everyone below the leadership to feel empowered to do whatever their job or their role is. Because if the leadership trusts all the people they’ve hired and mentor, it flows to everybody else.”
But of course, accountability is about more than trust within the organization, right? I asked Matt how trust plays a role in his client relationships.
“There are some clients I’ve been working with for years now and there’s definitely a very strong connection and mutual trust that has been built. We’ll be asked things that normally we wouldn’t have been asked because the relationship is so strong. They may come to us and say, ‘Here’s something we’ve been working on, can you add your insight and expertise to it?’ That relationship adds up to you being accountable to them and feeling that connection.”

Accountable Accounting

Because everyone here is so mission driven, we are truly motivated by how many students we serve. And we know that by helping our schools be successful, we are helping them serve even more students. Matt’s team of comprehensive and caring finance professionals seems to always go above and beyond with our clients to do everything in their power to ensure that they succeed and grow. I asked Matt if he had any specific examples of how our culture of accountability directly impacted our school partners as it related to his work.
“There are several examples where we have found unique ways of looking at things and have helped clients tremendously beyond where they normally think we would help them. There was actually an error made at one state’s Department of Education with the amount of money that was sent to one of our school partners. We did some math and looked at our value models and said to them that we think you’re actually owed a substantial amount of additional funding from the state. After sending over our calculations, the issue was escalated it to the county (or whoever ended up looking at our math) and then the state realized ‘you guys are right, we didn’t do that correctly’. And then they sent the school a wire for the amount they deserved.”
Now that’s some accountable accounting. (Apologies, I couldn’t resist.)

Motivated by the Mission

At CSC, our ultimate goal is to help the charter school movement grow and flourish, and as mentioned (repeatedly), serve more students. Because we take pride in the social impact that we’re supporting by helping charter schools succeed, I asked Matt how that mission helps direct and motivate his work – and how that ties back to being accountable to the success of our clients.
“I think the charter school movement is a powerful movement. I’m on the financial side of the role and am looking at numbers a lot. But, over the past couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet, interact, and engage with the clients I’ve worked with in person. Remembering the powerful things that schools are doing and actually seeing the kids inside the school reminds you that what you’re doing in [the office] is actually benefiting somebody and it makes it all tangible.
Some of the clients that I work with rely on us for extra assistance and guidance. Sometimes, just being face to face makes that interaction much more successful, especially if you have to overcome a difficult obstacle together. It helps our clients realize that we actually are their partner. That is a pretty unique thing, that type of relationship. ”

Conclusion

So did that nebulous concept of accountability become more clear to me after speaking with Matt? Absolutely. Here’s what I now know:
Being accountable, or having accountability means;
• we’re responsible for our client’s success,
• we own our work,
• accept and learn from our mistakes, and
• earn the trust of our co-workers as well as our school partners.
And, it means that when we see a need – beyond what’s right in front of us – we go the extra mile to help us achieve our mission and even more important, help our school partners achieve theirs.

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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!

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.