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Charter School Report Card: What’s Working and What Still Needs Improvement

May 3, 2016
A Q&A with Nina Rees of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

As we celebrate National Charter Schools Week and approach the 25th birthday of the passage of the first charter school law, the Walton Family Foundation spoke with Nina Rees, the president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. For 10 years, NAPCS has been focused on fueling the growth of high-quality charters and shaping federal and state policies to create environments that support the growth of high-quality charters.

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What do you wake up every morning setting out to do?

Nina: I actually do wake up every morning thinking about ways to promote charter schools and increase the funding level for charter schools, both in terms of seed funding to launch new charter schools and replicating the most effective ones. One of my big priorities is to make sure that the gap between the funding that follows students to traditional schools and charter schools is ultimately eliminated. At the end of the day, what moves me to advocate for charters is the potential they provide to empower parents to make a choice for their child.

What are the biggest myths and misperceptions of charter schools that you encounter?

Nina: The fact that they’re public remains one of the issues that people continue to grapple with … We need to make sure they understand that charters are public schools but independently managed; we’re accountable to the public in the same way that a traditional school is accountable to the public, and in many cases, even more so. When it comes to laws dealing with disabilities, civil rights laws, health and safety laws, we are just as accountable as the traditional public school system is. And what’s most important, we are accountable to parents.

How would you assess public sentiment about charter schools?

Nina: Consistently, when people hear about charter schools, they like them. In fact, over 70% of the public supports charter schools. The more they know about them, the more they support them. One of the things they like about them is that they are public. So we have to be constantly vigilant about protecting the brand and making sure people understand how charters operate. The key for us is to change this general support into action.

You reported on the state of charter schools recently. What were your key findings?

Nina: We have a model law and we rank every state against that model law every year so that we can see how well the state law stacks up against an ideal law. We also just released a report called “Health of the Movement,” which looks at how well those laws are being implemented. This includes looking at how well each state allows for the growth of quality charter schools, measuring whether our charter schools are raising student achievement, and at making sure that they’re offering a diverse and innovative set of schools to the students they’re serving … One thing is for sure, there’s room for improvement, even in the strongest states. There are still things that remain to be done. Even in D.C., which came out at the top of our nation’s healthiest charter school sectors, there is still a funding equity gap between charters and traditional schools. This further gets into the question of facilities — “Can our schools access facilities in the same way that traditional schools can access them?” — which remains on the table in too many jurisdictions. Until we really solve these problems, charter schools are not able to operate on an even playing field.

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You were in D.C. 20 years ago when charters first became a reality in Washington. Can you talk about how charters have evolved in D.C. over that time?

Nina: Over 40% of students in D.C. are now attending charter schools. There’s a robust set of schools, many of them home grown, that operate in D.C. And we’ve had quite a bit of support from the community. So, we’re at a point where the residents of D.C. consider charters as part of the city’s fabric — the movement is here to stay. A lot of middle- and upper-income families who are living in D.C. now end up staying in D.C. because the quality of education has improved dramatically. So, when I think about the impact of chartering, I think about how many of these charters have revitalized their communities and how well some of them are keeping families in the city.

What are some of the lessons charters nationally have taught over the past 25 years?

Nina: The most obvious one is that if you give school leaders the autonomy to run their schools and hold them accountable for results, they will be able to produce better outcomes … The other thing — and the most important thing — is the notion that all children can learn and you’re not going to make any excuses for a child falling behind. That spirit is one that is crucial to a school’s success. And, of course, charters have demonstrated that empowering parents to select a school that fits their child’s needs is ultimately better than assigning students to schools based on their ZIP codes.

What are the big challenges for charter schools going forward?

Nina: Charters were conceptualized as laboratories of innovation. To the extent we are innovating, we do need to study them and figure out how we can replicate their successes across all schools so that even more students benefit. Second, we’ve made some progress in closing low-performing schools. That’s important, but better yet, a lot of authorizers are now using best practices in identifying strong leaders to run charter schools near the outset. This improves the overall performance of their schools earlier on. But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done in this area with more school systems and authorizers. The other challenges, quite frankly, are political. We need to become much sharper and smarter in fighting the opposition, but we also need to become more vigilant about really teasing out our best practices and sharing them with the traditional system. If there’s some sort of secret sauce in some of our schools, we should find a way to share them with others in a more systemic way.

What do you think the “big ideas” of the future of charters will come from?

Nina: The best ideas are going to come from the teachers and the leaders in our classrooms. I think the best thing we can do is to listen to what practitioners are doing, hear them, study what they’re doing, share it broadly, or come up with policies that will help them replicate it. I also think that technology — how it’s used to flip the classroom and offer a more customized experience to students — is a trend that we are going to better leverage.

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