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The president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools discusses the state of the charter school movement today and the challenges that lie ahead.
Nelson Smith, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
This is both a heady and a daunting time for the charter school movement. While the Obama administration has given the movement its biggest boost ever, having declared that states with caps on the number of charters allowed with not be looked upon favorably when Race to the Top applications are considered, Arne Duncan is counting on the movement’s help in turning around 5,000 of the nation’s lowest-performing schools over the next several years. We spoke with Nelson Smith, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, about the state of the charter school movement today and the challenges that lie ahead.
Q: Arne Duncan said in a speech at the National Charter Schools Conference in June, “Charter schools are public schools serving our children with our money. Instead of standing apart, charters should be partnering with districts, sharing lessons, and sharing credit.” What should charters be doing, or doing better, to create this kind of partnership with local school districts?
The first thing to understand is that about half the charter authorizers in the country are in fact school districts—local school boards, or county school boards, and so forth. And that’s a fact that’s often overlooked in this process. So there’s already a close relationship between many charter schools and the districts that authorize them. For the rest of the schools that are authorized by state-level bodies or universities, or other kinds of alternative authorizers, those schools are typically their own local education agencies, and they may operate with more autonomy than the ones chartered directly by districts. The challenge for charter schools and for districts is find some common ground.
Charter movement people have gotten a little skeptical about the big urge to cooperate more with districts and to share what we do with districts because the resistance, frankly, has usually come from the other side. I think the best quote I’ve ever heard about this is attributed to Yvonne Chan, the founder of the first conversion charter school in California, the Vaughn 21st-Century School, and she said, “I’m always asked, ‘When are we going to see ripples from your innovation?’” and she said, “‘You can’t see ripples if the lake is frozen.” I think that makes a very good point—that many districts, even those that have created charter schools, refuse to draw on any lessons learned there. And honestly, it has to work the other way too.
I think the Project for School Innovation in Boston, for example, which was actually created by a charter school, is a good example of the two-way street that we ought to see. It brings educators together from the charter schools and from the traditional public school system to try and share best practices. I’m also on the board of a school here in D.C., the E.L Haynes Public Charter School, that has a program that reaches out to teachers in the traditional system as well. So these are perhaps small examples, and we ought to be looking for ways to make this conscious sharing of innovation and sharing of best practices a more routine thing.
What would you say are the characteristics of these and other school districts or local school organizations that have best negotiated that successful partnership?
First of all, leadership is absolutely crucial. A superintendent, school board, and other top officials who see charters as a threat to their turf are going to react by calcifying what they’re already doing, rather than by trying to respond in a creative way. You see the right kind of response in a number of places. In New York City, for example, Joel Klein—who, full disclosure, is on my board—has aggressively courted the best charter operators in the country to come to New York and open schools, and he said that he wants New York to be a Silicon Valley for charter schools. But he’s then used the power of their examples to motivate reform more broadly throughout the system.
Similarly, here in D.C., Michelle Rhee, who spoke to our national conference in June, said that the fact that you have excellent charter schools in some of the toughest parts of the city is something that she can use as an example to her own troops to say that we can’t make excuses because of the part of town that kids live in or the baggage they might bring from home.
On a more functional level, a few years back when charter schools first began going into Chula Vista, Calif., the superintendent at the time, Libby Gill, and her staff decided to try to change what they were doing as a positive response. The story they tell is that the landscaping division suddenly realized that they had lost customers to the charter schools and that they could shop elsewhere. So they had to become more competitive and do a better job and win that business back.
I think you see something of the same thing in Milwaukee, where the presence of charter schools created an environment where much of the budget of the central office there is now built by purchasing decisions from the schools rather than from the top down.
Finally, Arne Duncan in Chicago, when he was there—I think his Renaissance 2010 program is deeply rooted in the charter school accountability system. He had in Chicago a group of high-performing charter schools that are held accountable according to a time-limited contract, and he basically looked at some of the larger, more dysfunctional schools in the system, and he began closing them down and replacing them not just with charter schools but with small and more community-centered and thematic smaller schools, some run by charter operators, some run by the city, some run on contract.
