Strengthening the Roots of the Charter-School Movement

Editor’s Note: This post about the feasibility of charter school expansion was originally published here by EdNext and written by Derrell Bradford. It ponders the question as to whether the charter school movement has the access to the political and grassroots support, capital resources, experts, and critical mass to sustain its growth. It also looks at the challenges that single-site charter schools are facing in contrast to their charter management organization (CMO) or education management organization (EMO) member school counterparts.
Our mission is to see continued charter school expansion, the overall growth of the charter school movement, and more students better served by having educational choice. 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 and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable. Please read on to learn more.

Over the past quarter century, charter schools have taken firm root in the American education landscape. What started with a few Minnesota schools in the early 1990s has burgeoned into a nationwide phenomenon, with nearly 7,000 charter schools serving more than three million students in 43 states and the nation’s capital.
Twenty-five years isn’t a long time relative to the history of public and private schooling in the United States, but it is long enough to merit a close look at the charter-school movement today and how it compares to the one initially envisaged by many of its pioneers: an enterprise that aspired toward diversity in the populations of children served, the kinds of schools offered, the size and scale of those schools, and the background, culture, and race of the folks who ran them.
Without question, the movement has given many of the country’s children schools that are now among the nation’s best of any type. This is an achievement in which all charter supporters can take pride.
It would be wrong, however, to assume that the developments that have given the movement its current shape have come without costs. Every road taken leaves a fork unexplored, and the road taken to date seems incomplete, littered with unanswered and important questions.
While the charter sector is still growing, the rate of its expansion has slowed dramatically over the years. In 2001, the number of charter schools in the country rose by 26 percent, and the following year, by 19 percent. But that rate steadily fell and now languishes at an estimated 2 percent annually (see Figure 1). Student enrollment in charter schools continues to climb, but the rate of growth has slowed from more than 30 percent in 2001 to just 7 percent in 2017.
And that brings us to those unanswered questions: Can the charter-school movement grow to sufficient scale for long-term political sustainability if we continue to use “quality”—as measured by such factors as test scores—as the sole indicator of a successful school? What is the future role of single-site schools in that growth, given that charter management organizations (CMOs) and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) are increasingly crowding the field? And finally, can we commit ourselves to a more inclusive and flexible approach to charter authorizing in order to diversify the schools we create and the pool of prospective leaders who run them?
In this final query, especially, we may discover whether the movement’s roots will ever be deep enough to survive the political and social headwinds that have threatened the chartering tree since its first sprouting.

One School, One Dream

Howard Fuller, the lifelong civil rights activist, former Black Panther, and now staunch champion of school choice, once offered in a speech: “CMOs, EMOs . . . I’m for all them O’s. But there still needs to be a space for the person who just wants to start a single school in their community.”
In Fuller’s view, one that is shared by many charter supporters, the standalone or single-site school, and an environment that supports its creation and maintenance, are essential if we are to achieve a successful and responsive mix of school options for families.
But increasingly, single-site schools appear to suffer a higher burden of proof, as it were, to justify their existence relative to the CMOs that largely set the political and expansion strategies for the broader movement. Independent schools, when taken as a whole, still represent the majority of the country’s charter schools—55 percent of them, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. But as CMOs continue to grow, that percentage is shrinking.
Examining the role that single-site schools play and how we can maintain them in the overall charter mix is not simple, but it uncovers a number of factors that contribute to the paucity—at least on the coasts—of standalone schools that are also led by people of color.

Access to Support

If there is a recurring theme that surfaces when exploring the health and growth of the “mom-and-pops”—as many charter advocates call them—it’s this: starting a school, any school, is hard work, but doing it alone comes with particularly thorny challenges.
“Starting HoLa was way harder than any of us expected,” said Barbara Martinez, a founder of the Hoboken Dual Language Charter School, or HoLa, an independent charter school in Hoboken, New Jersey. “We ran into problems very early on and had to learn a lot very, very quickly.” Martinez, who chairs HoLa’s board and also works for the Northeast’s largest charter network, Uncommon Schools, added: “When a CMO launches a new school, they bring along all of their lessons learned and they open with an already well-trained leader. At HoLa, there was no playbook.”
Michele Mason, executive director of the Newark Charter School Fund, which supports charter schools in the city and works extensively with its single-site charters, made a similar point, noting that many mom-and-pops lack the human capital used by CMOs to manage the problems that confront any education startup. “[Prior to my arrival we were] sending in consultants to help school leaders with finance, culture, personnel, boards,” Mason said. “We did a lot of early work on board development and board support. The CMOs don’t have to worry about that so much.”
Mason added that the depth of the talent pool for hiring staff is another advantage that CMOs enjoy over the standalones. “Every personnel problem—turnover, et cetera—is easier when you have a pipeline.”

Access to Experts

Many large charter-school networks can also count on regular technical support and expertise from various powerhouse consultants and consulting firms that serve the education-reform sector. So, if knowledge and professional support are money, some observers believe that access to such wired-in “help” means the rich are indeed getting richer in the charter-school world.
Leslie Talbot of Talbot Consulting, an education management consulting practice in New York City, said, “About 90 percent of our charter work is with single-site schools or leaders of color at single sites looking to grow to multiple campuses. We purposely decided to focus on this universe of schools and leaders because they need unique help, and because they don’t have a large CMO behind them.” Talbot is also a member of the National Charter Collaborative, an organization that “supports single-site charter-school leaders of color who invest in the hopes and dreams of students through the cultural fabric of their communities.”
What are the kinds of support that might bolster a mom-and-pop’s chances of success? “There are lots of growth-related strategic-planning and thought-partnering service providers in [our area of consulting],” offered Talbot. “Single-site charter leaders, especially those of color, often are isolated from these professional development opportunities, in need of help typically provided by consulting practices, and unable to access funding sources that can provide opportunities” to tap into either of those resources.

Connections and Capital

The old bromide “It’s who you know” certainly holds true in the entrepreneurial environment of charter startups. As with any risky and costly enterprise, the power of personal and professional relationships can open doors for school leaders. Yet these are precisely the relationships many mom-and-pop, community-focused charter founders lack. And that creates significant obstacles for prospective single-site operators.
A 2017 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report analyzed 639 charter applications that were submitted to 30 authorizers across four states, providing a glimpse of the tea leaves that charter authorizers read to determine whether or not a school should open. Authorizing is most certainly a process of risk mitigation, as no one wants to open a “bad” school. But some of the study’s findings point to distinct disadvantages for operators who aren’t on the funder circuit or don’t have the high-level connections commanded by the country’s largest CMOs.
For instance, among applicants who identified an external funding source from which they had secured or requested a grant to support their proposed school, 28 percent of charters were approved, compared to 21 percent of those who did not identify such a source (see Figure 2).
“You see single-site schools, in particular with leaders of color, who don’t have access to capital to grow,” said Talbot. “It mirrors small business.” Neophyte entrepreneurs, including some women of color, “just don’t have access to the same financial resources to start up and expand.”
Michele Mason added that the funding problem is not resolved even if the school gets authorized. “Mom-and-pops don’t spend time focusing on [fundraising and networking] and they don’t go out there and get the money. They’re not on that circuit at all.”
“Money is an issue,” agreed Karega Rausch, vice president of research and evaluation at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). “If you look at folks who have received funding from the federal Charter Schools Program, for instance . . . those are the people getting schools off the ground. And this whole process is easier for a charter network that does not require the same level of investment as new startups.”

Authorizing and the Politics of Scale

Charter-school authorizing policies differ from state to state and are perhaps the greatest determinant of when, where, and what kind of new charter schools can open—and how long they stay in business. Such policies therefore have a major impact on the number and variety of schools available and the diversity of leaders who run them.
For example, on one end of the policy spectrum lies the strict regulatory approach embodied by the NACSA authorizing frameworks; on the other end, the open and pluralistic Arizona charter law. Each approach presents very different conditions for solo charter founders, for the growth of the sector as a whole, and, by extension, for the cultivation of political constituencies that might advocate for chartering now and in the future.
Arizona’s more open approach to authorizing has led to explosive growth: in 2015–16, nearly 16 percent of the state’s public-school students—the highest share among all the states—attended charter schools. The approach also earned Arizona the “Wild West” moniker among charter insiders. But as Matthew Ladner of the Charles Koch Institute argues, the state’s sector has found balance—in part because of an aggressive period of school closures between 2012 and 2016—and now boasts rapidly increasing scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, particularly among Hispanic students (see “In Defense of Education’s ‘Wild West,’” features, Spring 2018). It has also produced such stellar college-preparatory schools as Great Hearts Academies and BASIS Independent Schools, whose success has helped the Arizona charter movement gain political support outside of its urban centers.
“When you have Scottsdale’s soccer moms on your side, your charters aren’t going away,” said Ladner.
NACSA’s approach, conversely, is methodical and therefore tends to be slow. Its tight controls on entry into the charter space have come to typify the authorizing process in many states—and have given rise to a number of the country’s best-performing schools and networks of any type, including Success Academy in New York City, Achievement First in Connecticut, Brooke Charter Schools in Boston, and the independent Capital City Public Charter School in D.C. However, some of NACSA’s policy positions could be considered unfriendly to sector growth. For instance, the association recommends that the initial term of charters be for no more than five years, and that every state develop a provision requiring automatic closure of schools whose test scores fall below a minimum level. Such provisions may have the most impact on single-site, community-focused charters, which might be concentrating on priorities other than standardized test scores and whose test results might therefore lag, at least in the first few years of operation.
Certainly, responsible oversight of charter schools is essential, and that includes the ability to close bad schools. “Despite a welcome, increasing trend of closing failing schools [over] the last five years, closing a school is still very hard,” Rausch said. “Authorizers should open lots of innovative and new kinds of schools, but they also have to be able to close them if they fail kids. We can’t just open, open, open. We need to make sure that when a family chooses a school there’s some expectation that the school is OK.”
The issue of quality is anchored in the pact between charter schools and their authorizers (and by extension, the public). Charter schools are exempt from certain rules and regulations, and in exchange for this freedom and flexibility, they are expected to meet accountability guidelines and get results. Over time, authorizers have increasingly defined those results by state test scores.
By this measure, the large CMOs have come out ahead. Overall, schools run by them have produced greater gains in student learning on state assessments, in both math and reading, than their district-school counterparts, while the mom-and-pops have fared less well, achieving just a small edge over district schools in reading and virtually none in math (see Figure 3).
But some charter advocates are calling for a more nuanced definition of quality, particularly in light of the population that most standalone charters—especially those with leaders of color—plan to serve. This is a fault-line issue in the movement.
“In my experience, leaders of color who are opening single sites are delivering a model that is born out of the local community,” said Talbot. “We’ve witnessed single-site charters headed by leaders of color serve large numbers of students who have high needs. Not at-risk . . . but seriously high needs—those ongoing emergent life and family conditions that come with extreme poverty,” such as homelessness. “When you compound this with [a school’s] lack of access to capital and support . . . you have this conundrum where you have leaders of color, with one to two schools, serving the highest-needs population, who also have the least monetary and human-capital support to deal with that challenge. And as a result, their data doesn’t look very good. An authorizer is going to say to a school like that, ‘You’re not ready to expand. You might not even be able to stay open.’”
When it comes to attempting a turnaround, standalone schools are again at a disadvantage relative to the CMOs. “What happens with the mom-and-pops is that if they don’t do well early—if their data doesn’t look good—there’s no one there to bail them out,” said Mason. “They don’t have anyone to come and help with the programming. The academic supports. And if they don’t have results early, then they’re immediately on probation and they’re climbing uphill trying to build a team, get culture and academics in place. CMOs have all the resources to come in and intervene if they see things going awry.”
Then, too, a charter school, especially an independent one, can often fill a specialized niche, focusing on the performing arts, or science, or world languages. “As an independent charter school, you have to be offering families something different, . . . and in our case it’s the opportunity for kids to become fully bilingual and bi-literate,” offered Barbara Martinez of HoLa. “It’s not about being better or beating the district. It’s about ensuring that you are not only offering a unique type of educational program, but that you also happen to be preparing kids for college and beyond. For us, [charter] autonomy and flexibility allow us to do that in a way that some districts can’t or won’t.”
In short, the superior performance of CMO schools vis-à-vis test scores does not imply that we should only focus on growing CMO-run schools. Given the resource disadvantages that independent operators face, and the challenging populations that many serve, we would be better advised to provide these leaders with more support in several areas: building better networks of consultants who can straddle the worlds of philanthropy and community; recruiting from non-traditional sources to diversify the pool of potential leaders, in terms of both race and worldview; and allowing more time to produce tangible results. Such supports might help more mom-and-pops succeed and, in the process, help expand and diversify (in terms of charter type and leader) the movement as a whole while advancing its political credibility.
The numbers tell the story on the subject of leadership. Charter schools serve a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students than district schools do, and while charter schools boast greater percentages of black and Hispanic principals than district schools, these charter-school leaders overall are far less diverse than the students they serve (see Figure 4). Though many may view charter schools primarily through the lens of performance, it seems that many of the families who choose them value community—the ability to see themselves in their schools and leaders—substantially more than we originally believed. Diverse leadership, therefore, is a key element if we want to catalyze both authentic community and political engagement to support the movement’s future.

More Is Better

A schooling sector that does not grow to a critical mass will always struggle for political survival. So what issues are at play when we consider the future growth of charter schools, and what role will single sites and a greater variety of school offerings play in that strategy? There’s no consensus on the answer.
A more pluralistic approach to charter creation—one that embraces more-diverse types of schools, academic offerings, and leadership and helps more independent schools get off the ground—might entail risks in terms of quality control, but it could also help the movement expand more quickly. And steady growth could in turn help the movement mount a robust defense in the face of deepening opposition from teachers unions and other anti-charter actors such as the NAACP. (Last year the NAACP released a task force report on charter schools, calling for an outright moratorium on new schools for the present and significant rule changes that would effectively end future charter growth.)
Another viewpoint within the movement, though, points out that the sector is still growing, though at a slower pace and even if there is a coincident reduction in the diversity of school types.
“We know the movement is still growing because the number of kids enrolled in charter schools is still growing,” said NACSA’s Rausch. “It’s just not growing at the same clip it used to, despite the fact that authorizers are approving the same percentage of applications.” He also noted that certain types of growth might go untallied: the addition of seats at an existing school, for instance, or the opening of a new campus to serve more students.
Rausch notes that one factor hampering sector-wide growth is a shrinking supply of prospective operators, single-site or otherwise. “We’ve seen a decline overall in the number of applications that authorizers receive,” he said. “What we need are more applications and more people that are interested in starting new single sites, or more single sites that want to grow into networks. But I’m also not sure there is the same level of intentional cultivation to get people to do this work [anymore]. I wonder if there is the same kind of intensity around [starting charters] as there used to be.”
Many charter supporters, however, don’t believe that an anemic startup supply is the only barrier to sector expansion in general, or to the growth of independent schools. Indeed, many believe there are “preferences” baked into the authorizing process that actually hinder both of these goals, inhibiting the movement’s progress and its creativity. That is, chartering is a movement that began with the aspiration of starting many kinds of schools, but it may have morphed into one that is only adept at starting one type of school: a highly structured school that is run by a CMO or an EMO and whose goal is to close achievement gaps for low-income kids of color while producing exceptional test scores. This “type” of charter is becoming synonymous with the term “charter school” across most of America. Among many charter leaders and supporters, these are schools that “we know work.”
In many regions of the country, these charters dominate the landscape and have had considerable success. However, given the pluralistic spirit of chartering overall, the issue of why they dominate is a salient one. Is it chance or is it engineered? Fordham’s report revealed that only 21 percent of applicants who did not plan to hire a CMO or an EMO to run their school had their charters approved, compared to 31 percent for applicants who did have such plans, which could indicate a bias toward CMO or EMO applicants over those who wish to start stand-alone schools. As Fordham’s Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern put it in the report’s foreword: “The factors that led charter applicants to be rejected may very well predict low performance, had the schools been allowed to open. But since the applications with the factors were less likely to be approved, we have no way of knowing.”
The institutional strength implied by a “brand name” such as Uncommon Schools or IDEA might give CMO schools more traction with authorizers and the public. “The truth is that telling a community that a school with a track record is going to open is significantly easier than a new idea,” offered Rausch. “But it’s important to remember that every network started as a single school. We need to continue to support that. I don’t think it’s either CMO or single site. It’s a ‘both/and.’”
If there is a bias toward CMO charters as the “school of choice” among authorizers, why might that be, and what would it mean for single sites? Some believe the problem is one where the goal of these schools is simply lost in the listening—or lack of it—and that the mom-and-pops could benefit from the assistance of professionals who know how to communicate a good idea to authorizers and philanthropists.
The language of “education people in general, and people of color in education specifically . . . doesn’t match up with the corporate language [that pervades the field and] that underpins authorizing and charter growth decisions,” said Talbot. “I think more [charter growth] funds, philanthropists, foundations, need . . . let’s call it translation . . . so there is common ground between leaders of color, single-site startups, foundations, and other participants in the space. I think this is imperative for growth, for recognition, and for competitiveness.”

What Now?

The future of chartering poses many questions. Admittedly, state authorizing laws frame the way the “what” and “who” of charters is addressed. Yet it is difficult to ignore some of the issues that have grown out of the “deliberate” approach to authorizing that has typified much of recent charter creation.
Some places, such as Colorado, have significant populations of single-site schools, but overall, the movement doesn’t seem to be trending that way. Rausch noted that certain localities, such as Indianapolis, have had many charter-school leaders of color, but the movement, particularly on the coasts, is mainly the province of white school leaders and organizational heads who tend to hold homogeneous views on test scores, school structure, and “what works.” And while some Mountain States boast charter populations that are diverse in ethnicity, income, and location, in the states with the greatest number of charters, the schools are densely concentrated in urban areas and largely serve low-income students of color. Neither of these scenarios is “right,” but perhaps a clever mix of both represents a more open, diverse, inclusive, and sustainable future for the charter movement. In the end, the answers we seek may not lie in the leaves that have grown on the chartering tree, but in the chaotic and diverse roots that started the whole movement in the first place.
Derrell Bradford is executive vice president of 50CAN, a national nonprofit that advocates for equal opportunity in K–12 education, and senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Since the company’s inception in 2007, Charter School Capital has been committed to the success of charter schools. We provide growth capital and facilities financing to charter schools nationwide. 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 support your charter school, contact us. We’d love to work with you!

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The Charter School Solution: Helping Students Who Need it Most

Editor’s Note: This video was originally posted by PolicyEd here. Can the charter school solution help close the student achievement gap in underserved populations? Studies show that charter schools are, in fact, leading the way in improving public education in America, especially for students who are traditionally underserved.
We think it’s vital to keep tabs on the pulse of all things related to charter schools, including informational charter school resources, how to support charter school growth, and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole. We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable. Please read on to watch the short video and find even more charter school resources and links.

The Transcript:

Charter schools represent the largest attempt to innovate in U.S. public education in fifty years.
More than 7,000 now operate around the country educating over 3 Million students.
And since they’re required to be transparent about their students’ performance, we’ve learned that two groups of students consistently show strong learning gains relative to their peers in the district schools.
The first group are predominantly minority and low-income students in urban charter schools. They make substantial gains in both math and reading compared to students in other schools in their area.
The second group is comprised of students enrolled in charter school networks called Charter Management Organizations, which are made up of three or more schools under common management.
Their students do even better than those in independent charter schools.
These networks learn what helps their students, and then replicate what works across all the schools they manage.
By identifying proven methods and spreading them to other schools, districts, and communities, charter schools are leading the way in improving education in America, especially for students who are traditionally under-served.

Additional Information and Charter School Resources:

“Urban Charter Schools Report” and 22 state-specific reports that combine to offer policymakers unprecedented insight into the effectiveness of charter schools from CREDO, available here: https://stanford.io/1C8GoKF
“Charter Management Organizations, 2017” examines the life cycle of charter school networks from founding of the flagship school to development and eventual expansion of the network, available from CREDO here: https://stanford.io/2s6uFPW
CREDO’s Charter School Performance in New York here: https://stanford.io/2oWWYCi
CREDO’s Charter School Performance in Texas, here: https://stanford.io/2BPTqau
For more CREDO Research Reports, click here: https://stanford.io/2syrRgL
“L.A. could learn a lot about charter schools from the Big Apple” by Margaret Raymond, available here: https://lat.ms/2jNLZcb
“It’s Time to Get Serious About Charter School Quality” by Margaret Raymond, available here: https://bit.ly/2mTxGEq How Well Are Teachers Doing? by Margaret Raymond, available here: https://hvr.co/2jNM8fJ

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Dispelling Common but Unfair Charter School Myths

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 27, 2018, here. It was written by Demi Brown, the founding director of Empower Charter School in Linda Vista, California.
We love articles like this that help dispell some common but unfair charter school myths:

Charter schools are private schools
Charter schools are selective
Charter schools aren’t accountable
Charter Schools “take away” funding from the district (Brown’s point here, that education dollars belong to the student, not the district, is particularly poignant)

At Charter School Capital, we are 100% dedicated to the charter school space and measure our success by the number of students we serve. Our ultimate goal is to help the charter school movement grow and flourish, and be able to serve more students. We take pride in the social impact that we’re supporting by helping charter schools succeed and 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 and the advancement of the charter school movement as a whole.
We hope you find this—and any other article we curate—both interesting and valuable. Please read on for Ms. Brown’s complete story.

Why the greedy corporate charter school image is so wrong

By Demi Brown
My school recently celebrated the end of the school year with a graduation ceremony. It was a moment of great pride and honor for me. After four years, our school now serves about 130 students and we offer a unique Spanish dual language immersion program — and adding Mandarin next year!
This moment of joy in our school community was a sharp contrast to how a recent report commissioned by In the Public Interest, “The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts,” would have you picture my school. They would present me as Scrooge McDuck trying to overtake the school district, rather than someone who spends most of her day coaching teachers to be their best and helping students navigate the ever-changing roadblocks that hit low-income families. The greedy corporate charter school image skimming students and lacking accountability is overplayed and in need of a reality check.
The fact is charter schools are public. Like traditional neighborhood schools, they are free to attend. Unlike traditional schools, they have no attendance boundaries and are run independently of the school district. As a public school, there is also nothing private about how charters are governed, with most following the Brown Act for open public meetings. Independent? Yes. Private? No.
I founded Empower Charter School because I wanted a school like this to exist for my own children. If you talk to other charter founders, their story is similar — they rose to the challenge to build a school for students who would otherwise be left out of an education system that best fits them.
This is not to say traditional schools are bad — they work for most, but not all. There are successful and unsuccessful schools in both districts and charters. To take a few bad charters and use them as evidence against all charter schools is a disservice to the truth, and ultimately to students. Most charters empower teachers as the leaders and professionals that they are. Charter schools can work outside of the system, shredding layers of bureaucracy so we can focus on learning.
Two big lies about charter schools: They are selective, and they aren’t accountable. These mantras have been repeated over and over to the point that they are taken as truth. But they are the easiest to dispute because the facts are the facts.
RELATED: Flexibility for Accountability
In California, charter schools are open to all. If a school has more applications than available seats, they must hold a random lottery. This is a law!
In exchange for flexibility, charter schools must meet high standards of accountability, even more than their traditional district counterparts. In addition to being required to meet state and federal education standards, they must also meet high student achievement goals and rigorous academic, financial, and managerial standards to be allowed to operate.

…education dollars belong to the student, not the district. To suggest that the funding is lost presumes it was the district’s to begin with.

A new concern came up recently when In the Public Trust released a study stating charter schools are costing districts money. However, when calculating the “cost to the districts,” the study calculated a regional dollar value by the number of current charter students enrolled in each district. This is erroneous for many reasons. First, education dollars belong to the student, not the district. To suggest that the funding is lost presumes it was the district’s to begin with.
Second, charter schools have been around in California for 25 years, school districts should have been prepared to adjust to shifting enrollment due to many other factors, including declining birthrates, families moving out of the state and students choosing non-district schooling options. Furthermore, the San Diego Unified School District chose to stop offering services to charter schools, which is a big missed revenue opportunity. And, the math doesn’t add up. Charter school enrollment has been steady over the last few years in San Diego Unified, the state has increased its revenues to schools, but somehow the district faces a large deficit and charter schools are to blame.
Today, about one in 10 students in California attend a public charter school. Charters are one piece of the education puzzle. We are not billionaires running faceless schools. We are educators who care deeply about ensuring all students have an education that best serves their needs.
That is the simple truth. Unfortunately, the lies funded by anti-charter groups have been louder, so the truth gets lost. I encourage people to dig deeper, question, and visit a charter to see firsthand the innovative work we do to meet the diverse needs of all students.

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Security for Charter Schools: The Five Layers of School Safety

Our schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning, free of crime and violence. School safety is linked to improved student and school outcomes. In particular, emotional and physical safety in school have been shown to be related to academic performance. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved, but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the school itself, and the surrounding community, as stated in the 2017 Indicators of School Crime and Safety.
For this important and timely webinar on school safety, we are fortunate and honored to be joined by nationally known expert on emergency preparedness, the President and CEO fo Safeguard Risk Solutions, Gary Sigrist.
On Thursday, September 13 at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET we’ll be discussing important topics around safety and security for schools, specifically looking at security challenges in charter schools. Join us and learn the five key layers of safety for your school and students. We’ll cover safety measures, emergency planning, threat assessment, and more!
We hope you’ll join us.

SAVE MY SPOT

CHARTER EDtalk: A Charter Leader’s Advice on Immigration Policy and Families

With all the news of children being torn from their families, we have a story from one of our charter leaders that is more important today than ever. We realize that politics and immigration laws touch charter families in many ways, and want to share this video because hearing the stories of students we serve moved us so deeply.
Editor’s Note: On the day that the separation of children from their parents has apparently ended, we are posting this charter leader’s experience with immigration laws and policies, and their ramifications on charter school students and their families. Find the CHARTER EDtalk video and transcript below.

Janet Johnson: Hi there and welcome to CHARTER EDtalk. I’m Janet Johnson with Charter School Capital and we are delighted today to have Ricardo Morales, who is the Founder and Executive Director of Academia Avance here to speak with us along with Marci Phee, who is our Director of Client Services. We are very grateful to have you come and talk about a very important topic today. Marcie, take it away.
Marci Phee: Thanks Ricardo. Ricardo and I worked together for years, so this is a great conversation among friends.
Janet Johnson: That’s great.
Marci Phee: Would you give us a overview of the debate regarding the collaboration between school staff and immigration policy enforcement?
Ricardo Mireles: Oh yes. Obviously right now there’s a lot of attention on it, but it’s important to know that this is not new. The attempt to use public service employees to try to enforce federal immigration laws goes, goes way back. And in fact, the current attempts are building on something that was successful. So, some historians estimate that as many as file million Mexicans left the United States in the thirties in 30’s and the 40’s not because they were deported, but because they got scared and left from other efforts and so getting other people involved to try to push people out is not a new thing.
And, if we think back to, the Plyler Decision that comes out of Texas, a constitutional position, it found that public education is a right for everybody, regardless of immigration status—that is a constitutional obligation. And so schools need to do that. And that they keep trying to get around this. This is was what prop 187 in California was, the attempts in Arizona, and Alabama, and now in Texas. And they keep trying to come back to an issue that has already been established. And so what I try to convey to school leaders is this isn’t about trying to change a law and make things better. It is the law and we need to do it to protect families and that our attempts to reinterpret law – and in fact that’s kind of what’s happening right now, reinterpreting the rules – and now it seems it’s okay to take kids away from families. That was never okay. And so let’s not allow it. We didn’t allow it in the past, let’s not allow it now.
Marci Phee: How does this impact charter schools, specifically?
Ricardo Mireles: Well, we have an opportunity, our school, a small school—the independence, the autonomy that we have now, it’s an autonomy for how you operate the school, to the autonomy for how you designed the curriculum. But I think it’s also an autonomy for how we can interact with our families and we have to use this. Now, the traditional schools are also trying very hard on this very issue and we were very happy to – Avance together with other schools– put together a collaborative called CASAS, which is California Schools Are Sanctuaries. And we adopted the ACLU Sanctuary Toolkit early on and not as a resolution but as a specific set of operating policies and procedures. Then we advocated with schools in California and LA Unified, which has always been a champion for immigrants and all families. They adopted this statement as well. Then, we kept pushing it and now it became law. So the new AB 699 law, California law, which specifically outlines the provisions that schools must follow terms of protecting immigrants and their families, like all the other protected classes.
So, what is it that charter schools can do, is use your autonomy to be able to move quickly to address these issues. And I would add that what is the whole fundamental core, in my opinion, for education, it’s the trust that frames education, that the trust that parents have, they’re taking their most treasured – their kids – and take them to your school. So, obviously it’s based on trust. It can’t be a passive trust. You have to do something with that. It’s our responsibility as school leaders to do something with metrics and in this context with immigrant families, it’s not this kind of hands off approach that was essentially what most schools were doing and we all kind of felt, well, we’re going to be fine.The new president’s going to fix everything and we’re going to be okay.
We’re not okay. And so the tactic can be a more benign, along the sides. It has to be very active and proactive in and work with families. Are you ready? Have you had the hard conversation with your kids? The epiphany that I had when our parent, who was detained by ICE in February 2017, was ‘what could we have done before?’ If we already know, as a college prep school, what people’s immigration status is as part of their financial aid preparations. It’s going to come out, we’re gonna know senior year, then why are we waiting until the senior year? Why can’t we work with these families? Maybe not the second graders or third graders, but eighth graders, ninth graders, let’s get these kids involved. Let’s find these solutions and get people prepared way earlier not at the last minute when it’s too late. And I believe schools need to do that and the way to do that is to use the trust that you have to work with families because they won’t tell you anything if they don’t trust.
Janet Johnson: It’s almost like different kinds of security prevention, you know, protection, isn’t it?
Ricardo Mireles: Yes. And that word is used in so many different contexts. This context about security, and I know you don’t mean it that way, but also the first thing that people were responding to with this crisis is the physical security of the campus and how do we keep ICE away from campus. Well, as it turns out the Plyler decision already does that for you. Right? And the, the Department of Homeland Security already has a policy that specifically states that they’re not going to take action, for the most part, on schools. That’s already there. It’s already policy and law. So there’s a lot of concern about what do we do if ICE shows up. They’re not supposed to show up. Now, if they do show up then you’ve got other issues that we’re going to have to deal with and these AB 699 procedures are going to help you with that. But, this is about emotional security, a security which we need so that kids can stay focused on learning. We had this huge incident, right after our situation in February 2017 and all these kids saying, “I need to use the phone”, they come into the office “I need to use the phone.” And then in donned on us… [they were checking] “Is my mom still home?”
Marci Phee: Has that gotten better? Take a moment.
Ricardo Mireles: Yes, it has gotten better.
Janet Johnson: Mercy.
Editor’s Note: Our team all took a moment here to gather ourselves after Ricardo shared that poignant story.
Janet Johnson: Thank you for sharing that. Seriously. Many of us are parents and no one should be put in this kind of place and no child should be put in this kind of place.
Ricardo Mireles: You asked me if it’s gotten better. It’s gotten better in one particular way. Many ways, but let me focus on one. especially with this family. My favorite headline was on September 2nd, right after he got released and it said that he went from a taquero [someone who makes or sells tacos] to activist. And so, this was a gentleman who was put in your most difficult situation—to be away from his family. And he comes out like I’m ready to go. I’m ready to advocate for all those other guys that are still in there … and quite strongly. And he was a big push for SB 54 in the California Senate to push for more protections. He’s the first one now at the school when we need something. So he’s super, super activated to make change and now all his kids are as well. So, it’s gotten better for him, it’s gotten better for his family, for his kids. It is kind of better for our school to realize, wait a second, we can beat this. That struggle translates in the sense of now you have a Parkland situation. Our kids were out there, they did a walkout. And we took kids to the march in DC, the march in LA, one of our students was a speaker at it, to come out on this issue. So, in Spanish, “No hay mal que por bien no venga”, or “Every cloud has a silver lining,”right? So that something happens and it should trigger a bigger response. And we’re seeing that happen.
Marci Phee: Charter schools in my experience and those I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know and visit, but that they they’re not just a community but that they strengthen communities and everything you just said reinforces that for me.
Ricardo Mireles: I would present this early on at Avance, that we’re a three-legged stool. Students, parents, and school/teachers. Not a four-legged stool, it’s a three-legged stool. And what happens is if one gets wobbly, it forces the other two to immediately reinforce. We’ve got to hang together or else the school’s going to fall over. And so it’s much more immediate, the need to to everybody be together in a charter school.
Janet Johnson: What a great way to sum it up. Seriously. I want to thank you so much for being here and sharing your, your, your wisdom with us in this day and age. Both of you.

Charter School Resource: Toolkit for New School Development

Editor’s Note: The start-up stage includes the very first tasks required to form a charter school: hiring, launching, and running until 10 – 25% of your target enrollment has been achieved. Without a doubt, this is the most challenging and stressful stage for charter school leaders. If you’re at this stage now and you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. We found this charter school resource and hope that the toolkit we share provides helpful tips for you and your team to develop a strong charter, build culture and community support, and supports your growth.
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 School Development: A Toolkit for Charter Support Organizations and Charter School Founders

Opening & Expanding, Operations & Compliance, Leadership, Facilities
TOOLKITS|THE NATIONAL CHARTER SCHOOL RESOURCE CENTER|10 APR, 2018
Planning & Designing, Starting a Charter School, Communications, State Reports, Educators, Charter School Family and Community, Recruitment & Retention, Opening & Expanding, Operations & Compliance, Leadership
DOWNLOAD TOOLKIT HERE
The National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) released a new toolkit to help Charter Support Organizations (CSOs) and charter school founders find key resources on opening a new charter school. The number of new charter schools opening each year is down in many states. Founding groups report a variety of challenges that make it more difficult to open new schools, including securing affordable and appropriate facilities and estimating enrollment or recruiting students, among many others.
In response to these challenges, the NCSRC has designed a navigational toolkit that provides a wide array of publicly available New School Design (NSD) resources from across the country. These NSD resources focus primarily on supporting founding groups during the planning and start-up phases of a charter school’s life cycle. Founding groups can use this toolkit to research CSO NSD services, find advice from charter school founders, and explore NSD resources to strengthen their understanding of what it takes to open a new charter school. This toolkit was developed with four main sources of data:

Interviews with experts at state-wide CSOs that support NSD
Questionnaire responses from charter school founders
Reports from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Research on NSD resources

You can download the Excel spreadsheet referenced in the toolkit here.

The Charter School Growth Manual
Although charter schools are champions of educational diversity, they typically face similar sets of challenges and encounter the same potential pitfalls, regardless of their focus, location, or population.
For this charter school resource guide, we turned to our wide network of charter school experts for best practices and strategies for success at every stage of maturity. All of the advice in this book comes from experienced charter school leaders who have been where you are now—they understand what you’re facing and the pitfalls to avoid.
Whether you’re just beginning the process of starting up a charter school, looking to expand, or trying to prioritize your next steps, download this guide to get expert tips and pitfalls to avoid as you grow.

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Fulfilling the Charter School Promise: Accountability Matters; So Do Freedom, Fair Funding, and Strong Operators

Editor’s note: This post was originally published here by The74 and written by Andrew Lewis, an education and political consultant and the former longtime executive vice president of the Georgia Charter Schools Association. Charter schools operate within a framework of flexibility for accountability. At first glance, this may seem like a simple equation, but in fact, is quite a complex formula that involves the schools, the authorizers, the state, the boards of directors, the districts and communities in which charter schools operate, etc. This article is an enlightening look at the players involved in fulfilling the public charter school promise. It examines the need for more balance as it relates to regulation of charter schools—with too much regulation threatening the flexibility promise of those schools. We discussed the need for balance between the authorizers, governing board, and resources in this CHARTER EDtalk with Darlene Chambers. This post is similar but highlights the consequences of over-regulation by state policymakers, as well as the responsibilities of authorizers and school boards, and then touches on the accountability of the schools to live up to their end of the contract. 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.

Public charter schools, at the concept’s simplest, can be thought of in mathematical terms: flexibility under state education law + autonomy of decision-making by the governing body of the school + the highest accountability in public K-12 education = increased student achievement.
The equation is simple, but the reality of the equation is brutally complicated. The difficulties for those attempting quality reforms through chartering are made more challenging by district leaders and state policymakers, as well as many charter schools that sign up for the charter promise and then want to look the other way when accountability comes into play.
Nationally, the above charter-sector equation too often comes up short. The inability to make this 1+1+1=3 formula work leaves charters mired in an unfulfilled promise with, in practically every state, inequitable student funding. This scenario creates an environment for academic and operational failure. For state policymakers and local boards of education, these sets of circumstances are either unintentional, and therefore irresponsible, or intentional, and therefore immoral.
The 2017 University of Arkansas study “Charter School Funding: Inequity in the City” compared charter school funding with that of traditional public schools in 14 major metropolitan areas across the United States. The study notes that “public charter schools receive an average of $5,721 less per-pupil than traditional public schools, which represents a funding gap of 29 percent.”
State policymakers are fortunate that they rarely have to explain to parents of charter school students that their child is worth, on average, 70 cents on the dollar.
The first part of the charter school promise is intended to free up charter schools from bureaucracies that often thwart innovation in the classroom or at the school level. The broad flexibility that is supposed to be afforded is far too often a mirage. State and local policies, rules, and guidance continue to undermine the flexibility to innovate, making many charter schools across the country nothing more than a charter school in name only. Providing “flexibility” under state law and then passing laws, rules, and guidance that strip away that very same flexibility goes counter to the charter promise and is bad policymaking.
Benjamin J. Lindquist, a venture philanthropist and grantmaker who spent 22 years as an Arkansas charter school operator, warns, “If overregulation isn’t fixed, it won’t just stifle the charter sector’s growth. It will erode the performance and sustainability of existing schools because they’ll gradually lose the capacity to perform in a flexible, responsive fashion.”
Lindquist highlights his state’s tendency to over-regulate by subjecting charter schools to monitoring from 13 different divisions of four separate state agencies, each with its own unique set of requirements. These burdens are on top of other layers of bureaucratic mandates.
Unfortunately, similar creep continues to spread across the nation, keeping charter schools from their promise — to ultimately be responsible for outcomes (student achievement) as opposed to unnecessary and overbearing inputs.

“America’s charter schools resemble an artist who is expected to paint masterpieces while forced to wear thick mittens.”

Chester Finn, president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, noted in the 2010 study “Charter School Autonomy: A Half-Broken Promise,” “America’s charter schools resemble an artist who is expected to paint masterpieces while forced to wear thick mittens. Our policymakers and school authorizers, by and large, have not fulfilled their part of the grand ‘bargain’ that undergirds the charter school concept: that these new and independent schools will deliver solid academic results for needy kids in return for the freedom to do it their own way. There’s been plenty of attention in recent years to the results side of that bargain, but precious little to the freedom side.”
The role of a charter school authorizer, whether a local board of education or a dedicated state authorizer, is to provide quality oversight, ensuring the charter school is meeting the obligations set in its charter contract. It is then up to the governing board of the charter school to make decisions on mission, vision, and other determinations the board deems is in the school community’s best interest.
This is an area that requires far more out of local districts and state policymakers. Authorizers are often quick to meddle in the decision-making of a charter school board, influencing decisions through various means.
Georgia, where I have worked in the charter sector for 15 years, is an example of the broken promise to charters. In recent years, my state has:

mandated how charters are to assess their teachers and leaders
dictated goals in charter contracts that are not charter-specific
undermined state law allowing high-achieving charter schools to receive a 10-year renewal by adopting a State Board of Education rule capping all renewals to five years (who knew a rule is stronger than the law?)

Georgia, like so many other chartering states, continues down a path of adding layer upon layer of bureaucracy in charter contracts, in law and in rule, causing charter schools to resemble traditional public schools rather than the laboratories of innovation they are supposed to be.
And what is a charter school board to do if it finds such meddling erroneous? It is a rare occasion when a charter school board takes its authorizer or the state to task, fearing retribution down the line. Call it human nature or what you will, there is a reluctance to challenge the very entity that holds your life in its hands.
At the same time, boards of charter schools in too many cases have also failed their constituents on the charter promise. Too many charter school boards do not provide a level of quality governance and oversight necessary for the charter school to operate satisfactorily. Unwieldy, incestuous and unreliable charter school boards are too common across the country. Charter schools must do a better job of instilling strong governance through committed community members with varying backgrounds if the charter is to fulfill its promise. Where you find a strong charter school, I will show you good governance and committed leaders who understand their roles and responsibilities.
The last part of the charter equation we all must better understand is accountability. If a charter school is not living up to its obligations, it runs the risk of closure, the highest accountability in public K-12 education. But authorizer accountability needs to be consistent and fact-based, something that is lacking across the nation.
Authorizers must do their due diligence to make sure any closure or reprimand of a charter school is done as part of a transparent and thorough process. It is unfair to any charter school and the parents and students the charter serves to reprimand or close the school without providing the charter with opportunities to first understand and then remedy the issues at hand.
To increase standards across the United States, we must start holding charter authorizers accountable. Policies must hold charter authorizers accountable similar to how we hold an individual charter school accountable. If an authorizer, which is receiving funding from the very charter schools it oversees, is unable to perform its duties for its charters, shouldn’t the authorizer lose the ability to authorize altogether? States need to look at the example set by Minnesota, which has shut down 40 of its 70 charter school authorizers in recent years.
For charter schools not meeting their obligations academically and/or operationally to their various constituencies — do not complain about the very accountability you signed up for in your charter contract. Accountability matters. Failing to recognize appropriate accountability in the charter sector makes the sector hypocritical toward the standards we say we live by.
So the next time we read about a charter school closure, we must consider how policymakers, charter school authorizers, and charter schools themselves have all played a role in an unfulfilled promise to children and families. The promise is a good one.
Now everyone needs to uphold their end of the bargain.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this complex issue. Please post them below.

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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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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!

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.