The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) has updated its recommendations for authorizing practice related to charter applications and released new recommendations for state policy in the last year. Some of the proposed changes are timely, necessary, and likely to help everyone – charter students, operators, and authorizers. But there are places and contexts in which several of the proposals may not work out as planned, or even backfire.
NN4DA works with district authorizers around the country that do their jobs under different policy structures. For many authorizers, particularly small district authorizers operating under state policies that constrain authorizer authority, discretion, and resources, some of these proposed changes will not help.
I recently had a chance to talk about these issues on the NACSA podcast, Community Connections with NACSA. You can listen here to my conversation with NACSA’s Veronica Brooks-Uy. Veronica and I had an interesting conversation and a good back-and-forth about some of these issues. Please let me know what you think.
Below, I briefly lay out my reservations about some of these ideas, and I discuss these challenges in more detail in this white paper.
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Are Authorizing Best Practices Increasingly Becoming State-Specific?
As best practices in charter school authorizing continue to evolve and spread across the country, we need to adjust some of them in substantial ways to account for differences in state policy, authorizer authority and capacity, and dynamics in the local charter sector. Increasingly, what constitutes authorizing best practices, depends on the authorizer and where they are.
NACSA has released a suite of documents in the last few years to support its new approach. The NACSA website provides an overview, as well as a list of first steps. These resources build on a previous document that discussed how authorizers can evaluate The Capacities of Charter School Founding Teams. A supporting document provides a Sample Statement of Assurances. NACSA also created a Ready To Open Playbook that reflects the expanding Ready to Open (RTO) period. This initiative was informed by NACSA’s early Quality Practice Project, which convened an expert panel to reflect on evolving authorizer practice.
NACSA’s policy recommendations largely echo previous positions, but include important revisions. You can read an introduction to their recommendations here, more details on the specifics here, or download all the recommendations in one document.
Several proposed changes in policy and practice reflect logical next steps in the evolution of authorizing best practice. Periodically updating professional expectations based on the lessons we learn is something NACSA has championed since the organization’s founding. Kudos to NACSA for leading this initiative.
Other aspects may not work as planned. Some authorizers will struggle to implement the guidelines effectively due to a lack of experience and resources. Additionally, state law, legal precedent, and local policies may prevent many authorizers’ from taking steps that are necessary actions for this approach to succeed. Given this variation, the policy recommendations can also be problematic. In these cases, it may be unwise to adopt all these practices, at least not without adapting them significantly to each state’s context, or changing state law and authorizers’ power to allow authorizers to effectively use some of these proposed strategies.
NACSA has welcomed feedback on these new pieces, and worked with NN4DA partners to talk about what works and doesn’t work in local settings. This kind of dialogue is really helpful for everybody to understand how authorizing can evolve, and how local context affects that evolution. It is great to see that responsiveness, and I encourage all NN4DA partners to engage in this kind of dialogue.
As these ideas spread around the nation and people work to implement them, local stakeholders should carefully modify them to fit their state laws and charter context. Implementing this approach nationally, without customization, could lead to some struggling charter schools that end up harming kids and the sector.
The NN4DA state partners are well-placed to lead these local efforts in partnership with NACSA. Together, we should pursue the local exploration, adaptation, and adoption of revised approaches to charter applications and review.
Read more details on what I see as good parts and tricky aspects of NACSA’s guidelines, and things we should consider as we move the authorizing profession forward, in this white paper.
The NN4DA plans to support cross-state and state-based discussion of these issues. Please join us!