I hope everyone there had a great experience in Houston at both the NN4DA Annual Meeting and the NACSA Conference. I came away re-energized by the connections to so many people doing exciting work. I suspect we all left with a longer to-do-list and a bunch of reasons to try to work together more. This NN4DA Update describes a few of those ideas, including:
- Upcoming NN4DA National Calls on meaty authorizing topics;
- An effort to support state-level authorizer self-assessments;
- Collaboration to support research;
- Implications of a new Trump Administration for the CSP; and
- Some of the resources from NN4DA partners featured in Houston.
Upcoming Series of National NN4DA Calls
Many people have asked for more opportunities for cross-state meetings at other times in the year so that the NN4DA state facilitators and all our participating authorizers can gather for substantive discussions of major issues.
Based on that feedback, the NN4DA will be convening a bimonthly series of virtual meetings. Look for upcoming invitations for these meetings. The specifics of each meeting’s agenda will be shaped by our partners and their pressing interests and impactful ideas, and we will aim to address a couple of issues on each call. To help identify, prioritize, and schedule topics, please respond to this super-short survey. Information on the dates, times, and topics will be forthcoming.
Authorizer Self-Assessment Panel Discussion and Working Group
Several NN4DA partner states are working on authorizer self-assessments. Other partners are in states where a state entity evaluates all authorizers regularly, while the SEAs and CSOs running federal Charter School Program State Entity grants are pressuring NN4DA partners to evaluate authorizers. NN4DA partners are interested in taking the lead by creating their own evaluation tools.
When done right, an authorizer evaluation or self-evaluation can be a powerful incentive, heuristic, or roadmap for helping districts improve practice. In this environment, it would be best if all of this evaluation energy was anchored in what districts need, how they operate, and if evaluations ultimately engaged more districts in each of our state initiatives.
To support thoughtful and impactful authorizer evaluation, the NN4DA is launching an authorizer self-evaluation work group. All NN4DA State Partners and authorizers are welcome to join. Our goal is to create state-customized self-assessment tools that our partners can use with local districts. If you are interested in joining this effort, please reach out to alex.medler@nn4da.org.
As part of that effort, we are scheduling a conference call to focus on the project. Everyone is invited to join us for a discussion of authorizer evaluations on Tuesday, Dec. 3, at 1:30 pm MST. (Note, this is the time reserved for our first Tuesday of the month NN4DA call with both PSP and ISP leads. For this call, we are hoping other partners and authorizers will join.)
Zoom Meeting Link
Meeting ID: 879 7870 4836
Passcode: 765945
One tap mobile: +17193594580,,87978704836#
This first conference call will include an interactive panel with national experts with a great deal of experience in evaluating authorizers, including: former NACSA VP, William Haft, who led NACSA’s evaluation and technical assistance process. His team conducted in-depth evaluations of many of the nation’s most active authorizers and created tools and rubrics that have been used to shape evaluations in many other settings. We will also hear from our own ISP facilitators from PA and TN, Lauren Iannuccilli; and Michelle Doane, both of whom have conducted many evaluations for various state programs and individual authorizers; and David Hartman, who has conducted authorizer evaluations and led authorizer support work at School Works.
MIT Research Brainstorming
The MIT Blueprint Labs has announced the timing of the next Request for Proposals to support charter school research. More information will be released on December 11, and Letters of Inquiry (the first step in the application process) will be due February 5.
We hope to engage research partners, like WestEd or the Center for Learner Equity (CLE), and plan to seek funding for research that helps us all in our work. The group in Houston raised a lot of interesting ideas that could benefit from research, so our hope is to be involved in some research ourselves, while also influencing the direction of research of others, to get it looking at things that are relevant to our authorizing members.
The NN4DA will be convening people to discuss joint proposals, or to support individual partners’ own proposals. If you are interested in joining these discussions, please reach out to your state lead and to Alex directly at alex.medler@nn4da.org.
Implications of the Trump Administration for the Federal Role in the Charters
I am sure everyone’s inbox is full of articles prognosticating about the Trump Administration Version 2.0, including its likely impact on the U.S. Department of Education and the CSP.
I am betting that the new Administration will not succeed in doing away with the Department or in block-granting all federal money to the states. Other than that prediction, and despite my own thoughts on other aspects of their impact, I am confident that I’m not nearly as prescient as I think I am. Time will tell.
With that humility front of mind, there’s a chance that the discussions taking place in the charter sector about how to rewrite the legislative language that defines how the federal CSP operates could emerge as a viable issue in the next two years. Both NACSA and the NAPCS, among other stakeholders, had already begun discussions about how the CSP could be updated to reflect the needs of the charter sector in 2024.
If we have the chance, I would like to see increased investment in the state-level systems that support improved authorizing. That includes more funding that eventually makes its way to the NN4DA partner initiatives. I am also interested discussing whether we could use CSP money to help charter schools improve through a new subgrant program for existing charter schools to fund school improvement, turnaround, or improvements in equity. Perhaps these improvement and equity subgrants could be funded in partnership with their authorizers. Ideally, we could get resources to support efforts to improve charter schools that are not doing poorly enough to close, but not well enough to ignore. There might even be funding to provide grants to authorizers to improve practice.
We will continue to track this issue and plan to convene our own discussions about what NN4DA partners would like to see. I will be reaching out for input from authorizers interested in helping shape the future of the federal imprint on the charter sector. If you want to join that discussion, please reach out directly.
Materials from NN4DA and NACSA Sessions in Houston
It was gratifying to see so many district authorizers and NN4DA state partners featured in Houston. If you wanted to follow-up with anyone, or didn’t get a chance to download an interesting deck, I’ve assembled a list of materials that were used at the NN4DA Annual Meeting and by NN4DA Partners at NACSA.
NN4DA Annual Meeting Presentations
- Overview on the Status of the NN4DA National Dissemination Grant
- Cross-State Sharing – Sustainability Plans/Fee for Service Initiatives
- State Feature: Financial Literacy for Authorizers
- State Feature: CCAP Anti-Fraud Task Force Recommendations and Implications
- Using Technology Platforms to Support Authorizing
- MIT Blueprint Labs Presentation
- WestEd Presentation on Research
NACSA Sessions Featuring NN4DA Partners
- Authorizers’ Voting Board Members and Staff: Building Alignment and Leveraging Roles
- Collaborating for Capacity: How District Authorizers Can Build Relationships with State Entities and Beyond
- Aligning the Mandate of Community Needs Analysis with Strong Authorizing
- The “How”: Revamping a Performance Framework While Balancing Stakeholder Perspectives
- Building a Systemic Waiver Process for Charter School Autonomy and Accountability
- To Approve or Not Approve: A Problem of Practice for New School Applications