The $2 trillion CARES Act gives Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos thirty days to propose provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that should be waived by Congress. Special education advocates have expressed concern, if not outright alarm, that waivers could gut important civil rights protections for students with disabilities. School districts, however, are worried about being held accountable for providing hands-on services during the pandemic that would be impossible without putting the health and safety of their staff at risk.

In this forum, Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell, and John M. McLaughlin, managing partner of McLaughlin Advisors, debate whether DeVos should in fact propose any IDEA provisions to be waived, and if so, which ones, and why.

 

Don’t Waive Rights, Require Districts To Make a Good Faith Effort

By Robin J. Lake

 

 

 

 

Waive Away—But Tackle the Big Longstanding Issues, not just the Immediate Technical Ones

By John M. McLaughlin

 

 

 

The first Covid-19-related deaths rocked my state, Washington, in early March. More than a month later, Washington’s largest school districts have closed their school buildings and are not providing meaningful online instruction. Ongoing analysis by the Center on Reinventing Public Education shows the same is true for all but 10% of the biggest districts in the country.

Lack of universal broadband access, mass confusion over the best approach to online learning, and other issues no doubt contribute to this delay. But privately, many superintendents acknowledge that the risk of special education lawsuits is one of the biggest reasons for their paralysis.

Vague guidance from state school chiefs and from the U.S. Department of Education contributed to initial concerns that remote learning could leave districts out of compliance with special education laws. But such guidance has since been clarified. In particular, March 24 federal guidance made it clear that special education should not prevent districts from offering online instruction. And yet districts, for good reason, still fear lawsuits. One superintendent told me: “I can’t responsibly put my district in that kind of financial risk.”

Waiving the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, however, is no solution. Under current protocols, it’s not permitted. Even in the event of a national emergency, the Secretary of Education cannot waive the right to free appropriate education. If a school district is open for business, it must serve students with disabilities as outlined in their individualized education plans, or IEPs. This requirement exists for a reason. We cannot set a precedent that schools can simply jettison the rights of their most vulnerable students in an emergency situation.

Though Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has should ask the opportunity to ask Congress to give districts more flexibility about how to meet special education requirements in loosen existing laws in response to this emergency, taking them off the hook for whether to meet the requirements that would be the wrong thing to do. Efforts already underway in public schools across the country show it isn’t necessary. Federal help on the special education front in response to the novel coronavirus is needed—but in the form of funding and information, not repeal of longstanding rights.

A growing number of schools across the country are building remote special education programs that protect students’ rights. These efforts depend on innovation and collaboration.

The first step is effective communication with parents. As Lauren Morando Rhim has noted, charter schools like Paramount School of Excellence in Indianapolis, Friendship Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., and Strive Prep in Colorado, are contacting every parent of a student with an IEP to establish a line of communication and to understand what they need.

Some school districts are moving quickly, too. Henry County Schools in Georgia quickly developed a remote learning plan that spells out clear roles for special educators and classroom teachers supporting students with disabilities. The district will have virtual IEP meetings.

Each community’s solution might look different, but these efforts show it is possible for schools to make the shift to remote learning and still deliver the support that students with disabilities deserve.

Students with disabilities may suffer disproportionately if districts do nothing. Without the structure, routines, and support they receive during normal school days, they can suffer anxiety or lose academic focus.

Indeed, students with disabilities stand to benefit the most if school districts overcome their paralysis. States and the federal government could take steps to allay districts’ fears of lawsuits by offering to pay districts for any compensatory services they’re required to provide families. The goal should be to preserve parent and student rights, while protecting public schools that try their best to serve all students in difficult circumstances.

The Education Department can also help by issuing guidance that clarifies what good-faith efforts to deliver special education remotely should look like. This guidance should provide schools with examples of effective special education practice. This would not have a binding legal effect, but it could help guide any court decisions. Congress should also allocate funding to pay for districts to provide compensatory education, to ensure students who are the most challenging to serve virtually get the services they missed when school reconvenes.

Ultimately, this is a question of leadership. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was recently asked if he was worried about being sued by the Nation Rifle Association for failing to exclude gun shops from non-essential business closures. He shrugged off the concern: “I wish you could become immune to this virus the way I’ve become immune to NRA lawsuits.” State and district leaders should be a lot less worried about being sued for trying to serve kids in a national emergency than being sued for providing subpar services in normal times, which happens all the time.

In the end, school districts can’t escape their legal and moral obligation. There are many people who’d like to help—and a federal government that could help more than it currently is. Let’s go.

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell.

This is one half of a forum, “Should DeVos Ask Congress To Waive Parts of the Special Education Law amid the Coronavirus Pandemic?” For an alternate take, see “Waive Away—But Tackle the Big Longstanding Issues, not just the Immediate Technical Ones,” by John M. McLaughlin.

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

In the spring of 2015, Aleesia Johnson and Brandon Brown met for coffee. They both had new job offers.

Johnson was then a star principal at a local KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school and had been asked by Lewis Ferebee, the new superintendent at Indianapolis Public Schools, to head up his innovation strategy. It was a critical role: the state legislature had just passed a law making it possible for school districts to partner with charter schools rather than fighting them. New hybrid schools, comprising an “innovation network,” would have the autonomy of charter schools but would operate in district buildings and serve neighborhood students, sometimes replacing the district’s schools that struggled the most. Ferebee had lobbied for the law and now wanted Johnson’s help to put it into action.

As for Brown, after three years of running Mayor Greg Ballard’s charter-school office, he’d been offered a job at The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis nonprofit focused on building school quality and access in the city. Ferebee and The Mind Trust’s then CEO David Harris had already struck a deal to work together on the innovation network schools idea.

If Johnson and Brown both took the jobs, they would be spending a lot of time together. Brown would be incubating the new schools that Johnson would oversee. Johnson remembers that they looked at each other that day and asked, “Are you gonna take the job?” “I don’t know. Are you gonna?”

Today, Johnson is superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools and Brown is CEO of The Mind Trust. The city has 21 innovation schools serving one in four of its public-school students. Two new rigorous studies point to promising student-achievement gains. These autonomous district schools stand against a backdrop of a thriving public charter sector and a private-school voucher program that fill the gaps.

What made this all possible? Indianapolis is a story of good people, good politics, good local and state policy, and some small-town goodwill and good luck. The mayors led, state policy provided backbone, and civic leaders and philanthropies stepped up. They broke down institutional barriers in support of what most education-policy people will tell you is the unifying goal in the city: good choices for all families.

Mayors Lead the Way

In the late 1990s, Indianapolis faced a schooling crisis: the landlocked, post-industrial city suffered brain drain; as a result, its schools and students also suffered. There were 11 separate school districts and no citywide approach. (Since 1970, the metro area has had a consolidated city-and-county government that encompasses the city itself and 10 other Marion County communities that retain some autonomy but fall under the control of the Indianapolis government. More than 75 percent of Indianapolis Public Schools students are black, Hispanic, or multiracial, and about the same proportion qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The other 10 communities are largely suburban in character and have more affluent populations.)

Bart Peterson, a Democratic candidate for mayor in 1999, saw education as a way to build consensus on economic development. People had been trying to fix the ailing public schools for a long time, and Peterson believed a catalyst from outside the system was needed.

At the time, Peterson says, education reform was a contentious issue. “People couldn’t sit in the same room with each other,” he remarks. He believed that charter schools could provide the common ground, since they offered independence to principals but were still fundamentally public schools.

Candidate Peterson hired a young lawyer named David Harris, who jumped in to craft an education agenda, reading up on charter schools and following developments in states like Minnesota, where Democrats were supporting innovation and experimentation with charter laws.

Peterson won, and in September 2000, he made his case for charters in a speech to Indianapolis-area school superintendents. The atmosphere in the room was tense, but Harris says that coming out early on this controversial issue allowed the administration to control the narrative: “After that speech, no article about charter schools was written without a quote from the mayor.”

State Policy

Republican legislators had tried to pass a charter bill for seven years but had been thwarted by a Democratic-controlled House. Republican state senator Teresa Lubbers, the bill’s main champion, says she thought hard about the details of the bill, such as who would authorize charters and how schools would be held accountable: “I never thought it should be easy to start a charter school,” says Lubbers, now Indiana’s commissioner for higher education. “It should be hard, because there had to be a compelling reason why, for the students’ sake. It was an experiment, after all.”

A provision in the law would empower mayors to authorize charter schools in their cities; the mayor of Indianapolis subsequently became the first such official in the country with that authority. Peterson’s backing of charters and his willingness to play a central role as an authorizer proved important to winning Democratic support for the bill.

Advocates also won key Democratic votes when Republicans agreed to rescind a mid-1990s law limiting collective-bargaining rights in the school system, a measure that had been backed by then mayor Stephen Goldsmith.

The charter school bill passed the Senate in April 2001 and was signed into law by Governor Frank O’Bannon, a Democrat and charter school supporter. Determined to create as many reform tools as possible, the state kept up the pressure. Over the next decade, under Governor Mitch Daniels and state schools chief Tony Bennett, state legislators passed a whole package of reform bills: launching a voucher initiative, expanding charters and giving them rights to unused district buildings, allowing virtual charters, and overhauling teacher accountability. A public-school-choice law allowed students to move from district to district and forced districts to start marketing and fighting to keep their students. According to the House education committee chair, Bob Behning, the state’s early commitment to providing student aid for its 30 private universities further helped establish choice as a normal way of operating.

State representative Todd Huston (at the time, Tony Bennett’s chief of staff) credits Governor Daniels for bringing state officials together around the charter school policy: “A lot of it was Mitch,” he says. “None of this works if you don’t have a committed governor.”

Innovation Network Schools

Huston was a key figure in the passage of several bills, including the innovation network schools bill that would eventually transform the Indianapolis schools. A former school-board member, he understood the challenges involved in transforming school systems. Like many Hoosier education reformers, he had read about, and was inspired by, Milwaukee’s education reforms.

During the first dozen years of the new millennium, competition from inter-district choice and charter schools, along with the threat of state takeover of poorly performing schools, created an urgent sense that change was needed in the Indianapolis Public Schools.

Mayor Peterson’s early commitment to charter schooling held fast throughout his two terms in office. David Harris, his aide-de-camp, created one of the nation’s leading authorizing offices. Bucking national trends, Harris’s office drew on outside expertise to help develop a stringent review-and-oversight process for mayor-sponsored schools. Peterson was actively involved. Harris recalls late-night meetings with the mayor to decide specific performance metrics to use for accountability, for example. Before long, Harris saw the need to create a strong pipeline of charter operators by recruiting new talent to Indy and incubating new schools. In 2006 Harris left the mayor’s office and created The Mind Trust ( see sidebar).

In 2007, Bart Peterson lost his reelection bid to Republican Greg Ballard in a major upset. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and plainspoken former businessman, Ballard took office in January 2008. Unexpectedly to some, Ballard chose not only to stay the course on his predecessor’s charter-school strategy but to take it further. In 2012, during his second term, he recruited a young Teach for America alumnus named Jason Kloth to serve as deputy mayor of education, and elevated the charter office to the Office of Education Innovation. It didn’t take long for Kloth to see that educational improvement in Indianapolis would require more than just an outside push.

At the time, the school system was caught in a downward spiral, with enrollment having fallen to about 30,000 students in the mid-2000s from more than 100,000 in 1969. This drastic drop resulted from a combination of factors: students enrolling in neighboring-city school districts, the rapid expansion of charter schools, and the city’s changing demographics (see Figure 1).

The city’s school superintendent at the time, Eugene White, had little credibility with state policymakers, and state superintendent Bennett was threatening to take over the city’s low-performing schools under the authority of a law passed in 2000.

In response to a request from Bennett, The Mind Trust put out a report in December 2011 calling for the elimination of elected school boards and the empowerment of educators at the local level. Though controversial, this “Opportunity Schools” plan laid out a vision for transforming the city’s schools and paved the way for the innovation schools law. At the same time, Stand for Children, an education advocacy nonprofit, was raising money to get reform-friendly school-board members elected, and much of the public debate centered on The Mind Trust’s proposal. Over the next two years, 2012 through 2014, a series of events would set a bold new district strategy in motion. A new board was elected in 2012 (the same year Mike Pence became governor) and the board quickly recruited a young new superintendent, Lewis Ferebee, to start in September 2013.

A Civic Triangle

Ferebee was unknown on the national scene and had never run a school system before. He had served as a school principal at Guilford County Schools in North Carolina and then as chief of staff at Durham Public Schools, where he led a successful school-turnaround effort. Ferebee came to Indy with an open mind and no preconceived change agenda.

Jason Kloth in the mayor’s office approached Ferebee with an idea to present to the state. Informed by The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools report and the experience of other cities with district-charter collaboration, Kloth had been developing a plan that could help the Indianapolis school system transform itself while also enabling local charter schools to become more sustainable. Charter market share exceeded 30 percent, but growth had stalled, primarily because of lack of access to facilities. Community members saw The Mind Trust as closely aligned with charters and antagonistic to the district. The narrative had to shift.

The Mind Trust brought school-board members and local civic leaders to New Orleans, which was implementing the portfolio model—characterized by broad school choice for families (based on a “portfolio” of charter and district-run schools), plus autonomy paired with accountability for educators. The Indianapolis leaders hoped to apply the concepts of school-level innovation and empowerment to create an approach tailored to Indiana.

Kloth and his colleagues developed a legislative proposal to give district schools full charter-like authority as called for in The Mind Trust report. Governor Pence liked it. Key legislators liked it. So did a politically diverse civic organization called the Lewis-Hubbard Group, which had originally convened to develop citywide facilities recommendations. While the idea came from Kloth in the mayor’s office and The Mind Trust, the mayor’s staff worked through the statehouse and with the school system, and Ferebee took the lead. “It was very powerful to have the superintendent lobbying for it,” Ballard says.

Ferebee, Harris, and Kloth formed what one observer called a civic triangle to focus on creating high-performing schools. They were acting out of an immense urgency to avoid state takeover: charter growth showed signs of slowing, the school board was looking for a strategy, and the community was calling out for change. Innovation network schools held promise for addressing this predicament.

A Pivotal Decision

Despite growing support for the innovation schools proposal, getting the bill passed in the legislature was no slam-dunk. Civic activists were still angry and mistrustful over The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools report, and the teachers union was strongly opposed: innovation schools would operate outside of the union contract. Even Indiana’s committed choice advocates weren’t a sure bet for support, as many were wary of attempts to bring charter schools under the district umbrella.

By all accounts, Ferebee’s backing made all the difference in the bill’s passage. He asked that its name be changed to align with a district initiative he had underway (originally the bill was called the Freedom to Teach Act), but otherwise he ran with it, meeting with legislators and local opponents and explaining how autonomy could improve district schools. He was only months into his new job.

“Ferebee wants what’s best for kids,” says Ken Britt, dean of Marian University, calling him “the quintessential gentleman.” “He’s gone on the record saying, ‘If we can’t serve this child well, what gives us the right to keep a child in a failing school?’ He put courage and political capital on the line.”

The Innovation Network Schools bill passed in the spring of 2014. Shortly thereafter, Ferebee and Harris agreed to work together to create a strong supply of new innovation schools through The Mind Trust. Philanthropies supported innovation network fellows. Brandon Brown from Mayor Ballard’s office was recruited to take on an important challenge: create a new function at The Mind Trust, working with the school system and developing school models that could succeed in the district context.

Ferebee knew he’d need someone to help him oversee the innovation schools program and rejigger his central office to fully support autonomous schools. He met a highly capable young KIPP principal who might fit the bill: Aleesia Johnson came onboard and handled the technical and political challenges of launching the new-schools initiative while also managing the internal dynamics and turf issues in the central office. One of her early decisions helped smooth the challenges of implementation. The law gave the district a turnaround strategy by allowing it to replace low-performing schools with charters. Johnson decided, however, to expand the initiative by also inviting good district schools to apply for innovation status, thereby giving effective district educators the same freedom and autonomy that charters enjoyed. This approach created a natural internal constituency for the innovation schools program and ensured that the “brand” would include high-performing district schools, not just new charter schools.

Mariama Shaheed Carson, a local teacher and principal, was one of the first to open an innovation network school. She had tried to start her dream dual-language charter school—the Global Preparatory Academy—in another Indianapolis district but was turned down. She applied for The Mind Trust fellowship and opened her school in partnership with the Indianapolis schools. Shaheed Carson’s school brought early credibility to the program and helped spur interest from other local educators. The Mind Trust and Stand for Children informed families about the law in a series of community forums that helped build grassroots political support.

New Life for New Schools

Nationally, many charter leaders dismiss the concept of district-charter collaboration as a waste of time. If charters can be successful on their own, some have argued, why not just invest in their continued expansion? Indianapolis shows why such collaborations, when done thoughtfully, can be a win for charters, for districts, and, most importantly, for families.

Without the Innovation Network Schools law, Indianapolis charter-school expansion might well have hit a wall. Growth was likely to slow as The Mind Trust struggled to find and finance new buildings for charter school operators in the city. And if other cities are predictive, public perception might have eroded to the point where people started to blame district financial woes on charter schools. The Innovation Network Schools law has allowed the city to tap a new pool of innovators and has enabled charters to get greater access to district-owned buildings by taking over the operation of low-performing schools.

At the same time, the schools brought a new level of credibility to education reform in Indy and blunted political pushback. David Harris, initially skeptical about collaboration with the district, notes, “Educators are often upset about the innovation schools but then meet the leaders and see they are credible and have a long history in IPS. Importantly, successful schools have converted to innovation status, choosing autonomy over union protections, and are some of the strongest advocates for the law.”

Aleesia Johnson took over as superintendent after Ferebee left in December 2018 to run the Washington, D.C., public schools. As a former charter-school leader, Johnson saw autonomy as an enabler for great educators. In order to spur innovation, she reasoned, the district needed to free those educators; it also needed to find ways to reset toxic dynamics in chronically low-performing schools. Today, one out of four Indianapolis public-school students is enrolled in an innovation school (see Figure 2), but Johnson does not have a prescribed vision for how many such schools will eventually open. She plans to leave it up to educators to ask for the conditions to innovate and will force those conditions only when low performance demands it. In that way, she reasons, the innovation schools will continue to be what educators want, not what they fear.

Gains in Student Learning

More than a third of all public-school students in Indianapolis now attend a charter school, and the vast majority of the charters are authorized and overseen by the mayor’s office. The Indiana Charter School Board oversees the rest. Twenty-one public schools operate as innovation network schools.

Compared to district-run schools across Indiana, Indianapolis charter schools serve a student population with more challenging academic needs, more students who identify as members of a racial minority, and fewer students for whom English is a second language or who qualify for special education and an Individualized Education Plan. These same trends hold at the local level (see Figure 3).

Promising new results from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, show that in 2016–17, both charter schools and the new innovation network schools in Indianapolis had stronger reading and math gains than the city’s traditionally run schools (see Figure 4). The results were especially strong for black, Hispanic, low-income, and English language learner students. Compared to state averages, the results show more variation, with both innovation network schools and traditional public schools in the district showing weaker growth in math. The study, released in January 2019, compares each student’s gain to gains of similar students in district schools.

Another study conducted by researchers at Indiana University and released the same week as the CREDO study looked at elementary-school students who enrolled and stayed in Indianapolis charter schools sponsored by the mayor and found they outperformed their peers in all 11 Indianapolis school districts.

While Superintendent Johnson is pleased with the improvements in student performance, she cautions that early growth is to be expected in the innovation schools, given how low the scores were at baseline. She is looking to see sustained growth over time. She also notes that because the innovation schools label includes so many types of schools with different starting points and contexts, the trajectories of individual schools will provide more meaningful data than will performance averages.

Lessons Learned

The unique civic dynamics in Indy and the state of Indiana help explain why education reform in the city has been less contentious and more pragmatic than in many other places. Indianapolis is a small city where people know and like each other. Individuals may move to different organizations, but they stay committed to the mission. And then there is the “Hoosier Way,” a general belief that people should treat each other with respect and kindness.

Against this backdrop, leaders took a number of intentional steps to build and sustain political and technical supports for the expansion of choice. Some of the most important were:

Building trust and credibility. Several key charter advocates made it clear early on that expanding choice was not enough: quality was also paramount. The authorizer role was to establish and enforce clear quality standards. The Mind Trust’s role was to create the conditions that would ensure an ample number and variety of school options for families.

Focusing on quality and local authorizing would be best for students, these leaders believed, but it would also help build credibility. In the early days, nasty politics abounded. Superintendents were adamantly opposed to the mayor authorizing charters, but quality helped blunt their arguments.

Jason Kloth says many people initially thought there was a secret plan to take over the school district. But when the state, the school board, and the superintendent agreed to champion the Innovation Network Schools law, “we built trust and credibility,” he says. “It was the way we approached it: It wasn’t ‘let a thousand flowers bloom.’ Quality really mattered. People couldn’t say that we had a huge portfolio of mixed quality and were trying to blow things up. Credibility breeds trust. Quality builds trust.”

Continuity of smart and brave leadership. Leaders and advocates at every level strongly agree on what has driven progress in Indianapolis and what’s needed to move forward. A key factor in effecting change in the schools was the fact that four successive mayors, Democratic and Republican, maintained the same strategy over nearly two decades. And David Harris has been a constant throughout.

Peterson and Ballard credit Stephen Goldsmith, Peterson’s predecessor, with establishing a strong link between education and economic development in the city.

Peterson believed that charter schools “had the potential to save urban education,” he says. “My support was solely for policy reasons, not political, but it did not hurt me politically. In fact, it helped me.” Democrats denounced him on the policy but agreed with him on everything else, so it “didn’t hurt me with Democrats, and I won the support of reform-minded Republicans.”

When Ballard took the helm, he pushed the choice initiative forward and now cites the mayor’s office as modeling “the gold standard” for quality authorizing. “Less than 25 percent of those who apply get approved,” he notes.

As superintendent, Ferebee was, by all accounts, artful in building good relationships and inviting opponents to the table. Early in his tenure, he took time to look closely at the district budget; he found pots of money that he was able to repurpose toward supporting the innovation schools. This bought him a lot of goodwill among teachers and likely helped him keep innovation schools under the radar.

Local and national investments. Indianapolis, though small, has attracted significant local and national philanthropy over the years. The combined investments, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have supported talent recruitment, school incubation, community engagement, technical assistance for the district’s central-office transformation, and political advocacy for key policies.

Not long after the charter law passed in 2001, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, an Indianapolis-based philanthropy, supported a “lead and seed” initiative to try to attract national charter-management organizations to the city. When the national organizations declined to come, the foundation shifted toward seed funding to start The Mind Trust and help the city grow its own charter schools. Also stepping in with support were the Lilly Endowment, the Casey Family Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Highly cultivated, aligned supports. Through The Mind Trust, the city invested early on in talent and school incubation and other citywide supports, sparking rapid growth in charters and innovation schools. The Innovation Network Schools law allowed the city to “build a partnership that is advantageous for both district and charters,” in the words of Representative Huston, “but it doesn’t work without The Mind Trust.” Teach for America provided an essential talent pool, and that organization’s alumni now run half of the city’s innovation schools.

Unified front on choice. Over the years, Indiana policymakers and advocates have not gotten hung up over which kind of choice or regulation is “best.” Whether they prefer inter-district choice, charter schools, tax credit scholarships, vouchers, or innovation network schools, they have not let specific ideology undermine each other’s efforts. The overarching goal of “good choices for all” is the unifying mantra in Indy, and reform is not seen as a zero-sum game.

Commissioner Lubbers, who originated the state charter law, says it was more than a sense of civility and the “Hoosier Way” that created such harmony. Advocates for change also shared a true commitment to the power of choice. “There was the potential for charters and vouchers to be adversarial,” she says. “That didn’t really happen. People were brought together by the sense that students were being left behind.”

Civic leaders stepped up. The idea that a strong education sector is central to a vibrant city has motivated local leaders to push for change in Indy schools. As noted above, bipartisan mayoral leadership has been critical to effecting education reform—and right behind the mayors stood the city’s most-respected business, civic, and education leaders. The Mind Trust board includes some of the most influential people in the city, who backed Ferebee and helped him make his case for innovation network schools to the community. Civic advocacy was key in putting forth the mayors’ priorities.

State pressure and cover. A series of important state policy moves over the last two decades paved the way for a third-way approach in Indianapolis. In 2011, when the city schools were under the greatest threat of state takeover, new legislation created the voucher program and enabled charter school expansion. The year ended with The Mind Trust’s controversial report, and the groundwork was laid for the 2012 school-board elections. With the passage of the Innovation Network Schools law in 2014, leaders like Ferebee, an educator and a “gentleman” with no stake in the warring ideological camps, could pursue a new strategy.

Missteps and Challenges

Deep community engagement came late. The key actors in this story can be described as elites—and many of them are white men. It was not until recently that a more representative set of actors came to support reform and get deeply involved in these efforts. Inattention to community engagement was, by all accounts, The Mind Trust’s greatest misstep. It wasn’t until after the Opportunity Schools report that the organization invested in meaningful community engagement. Despite support from local newspapers’ editorial boards, the black community recoiled and many people saw The Mind Trust as a group of elitists writing plans to take over the local schools. According to Brandon Brown, “We needed to engage with people on the front end and build more internal team capacity for that engagement. You can’t ignore the community. Plans can’t exist in a vacuum.”

In 2013, The Mind Trust hired Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo to change its approach to community engagement, finding ways to more effectively listen to people and respond to their concerns. Shaheed-Diallo led many dozens of difficult meetings with opponents of The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools plan. David Harris says it was a challenging but critical process. Following nearly two years of targeted engagement, black leaders showed public support for the innovation network schools plan by attending the public event announcing the first participating schools.

Blind eye to existing talent, district leadership. For years, Indy education-reform advocates dismissed the idea of partnering with the Indianapolis school system, viewing it as hostile and defensive toward charter competition. But The Mind Trust leaders now see that they were naive to believe they could import all the talent needed to improve the city’s schools. They also realize now that they couldn’t expect charters to grow indefinitely without working with the district to tackle the barriers to such growth. Investing in district change strategies and relationship building proved necessary.

To be sure, the collaboration has hit some snags. Some schools complain of transportation logistics problems and other issues. But talented district educators who once lacked autonomy now have an avenue to start their dream schools, and the charter sector is reinvigorated. The Mind Trust has learned that investing in local talent pays off in many ways. Says Brown, “Once respected leaders experience the benefits of autonomy, they have conversations with their colleagues, which leads to more opportunities.” Seventy percent of The Mind Trust’s innovation network schools fellows are leaders of color, reflecting the city’s demographics and thus contributing to more community goodwill.

Inattention to special education and other supports. Indianapolis charter schools, which must provide their own special-education services, have sometimes struggled to meet the needs of all students. Some people allege that charter schools have “counseled out” students and, more broadly, that their lack of capacity simply causes families of children with disabilities not to consider them as viable options. About 14 percent of those enrolled in Indy charter schools are students with special needs, compared to 18 percent in the Indianapolis Public Schools. Too many charter schools in the city are good enough to be renewed but lack incentive and knowledge to continue to innovate for instructional improvements. Under the leadership of Brown and others, this is changing: a new special-education collaborative effort is underway to allow innovation network schools to access the district’s special-education services. The Mind Trust now provides curriculum audits to help schools identify gaps in instructional rigor. Still, these are both nascent efforts, and other citywide challenges loom for the increasingly decentralized school system, including transportation and facilities access.

The Work Ahead

Study results on innovation network schools prompt many in the city to say: “We’re doing well, but not well enough.” Continued sustained progress is the goal, but it is not assured. Reform advocates still hold a majority on the school board, but it is narrower than in 2012. Superintendent Johnson and her team must complete the difficult work of transforming central-office practices to support autonomous schools while also providing strong supports for the schools they manage directly. Schools that have made initial gains by improving their academic quality now must turn to tougher challenges that impede students’ learning, such as trauma, poverty, and opioid addiction. Marian University recently revamped its teachers’ college to focus on content experts, in-school training residencies for teachers, and more diversity to further fuel school improvement in the city; the need for this kind of retooling and rethinking will persist.

New statewide and local pressure on the schools to increase their focus on career pathways creates opportunities to help education leaders reimagine and rethink everything, but it also runs the risk of reinforcing tracking. Higher education commissioner Teresa Lubbers says, “We need to move students to where they want and need to be to have a meaningful life, within an economy that’s transforming all the time,” with many jobs changing and some being eliminated.

A $272 million tax referendum, led by Ferebee and backed by the Urban League and other civic organizations, passed in November 2018; the new funding will pay for teacher raises and capital improvements. (Some believe that the reformers’ decision to back the referendum rather than invest in board elections was a mistake and a reason that more union-backed school-board candidates won than were expected.)

Many state and local leaders are concerned that none of the other 10 school districts in metro Indianapolis have taken advantage of the Innovation Network Schools law. The state finance system allocates education dollars on a per-pupil basis, taking into account student-need factors such as poverty. As a result, school operators are more interested in opening in the city’s downtown core, where the money is, than in the outskirts. The policy is meant to concentrate funding in areas that most need new options, but students in the other districts have their own unmet needs. Poverty is increasingly shifting to the surrounding districts as the city revitalizes, and some wonder whether the changing demographics will eventually lead to a change in funding and more new schools opening in the other districts.

As the school system and its schools continue to evolve, so too must their supporting institutions. The Mind Trust has demonstrated its ability to do this by backing new designs for turnaround schools and others. By all accounts, the quality of incubation keeps getting better, but new challenges lie ahead as the organization tries to figure out how best to further school improvement without imposing on school autonomy and parent preferences. Momentum for attention to career-relevant learning and solutions for students with unique needs may give rise to new constituencies and new school designs.

Amar Patel, head of Teach for America Indianapolis, would like to see an organization like the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research provide third-party analysis by drilling down on the data and learning what’s working. He also notes that despite all the investment, the talent requirements in the Indianapolis schools are still “a bottomless pit.” Patel says Teach for America could place four to five times more people in the pipeline than they currently have.

State politics have shifted under the new state schools chief, Jennifer McCormick, who is perceived as hostile to reform. (McCormick will complete her term in December 2020 and will be Indiana’s last elected superintendent; beginning in 2021, the position will be appointed by the governor.) Without the aligned efforts of the governor and state superintendent, local reformers are counting on continued commitment from the legislature. Still, the success of reform efforts in the city to date demonstrates that strong local leadership is also an essential element for change.

Local politics are fragile, and school-board dynamics could create more hostility to reform. The mayor is up for reelection in a year. Aleesia Johnson believes this is a natural inflection point for Indianapolis. The mayors and the state set the conditions, she says, but now it is up to the community to make the most of it. Brandon Brown agrees: “How do you move from community engagement to community empowerment?” he asks.

The common refrain in Indianapolis is that the reform efforts to date have set important conditions but will not be enough to achieve excellence. Sustaining progress for students will require continued commitment from adults, says Jason Kloth. “We have the best public policy framework in the country. We are one of the best capitalized with local philanthropy. We have all of the institutions in place that people think are needed. . . . It took a long time to get people aligned. Now we need to genuinely and authentically implement.”

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell. Shannon Murtagh, Erik Luk, and Roohi Sharma contributed analysis and data to this article.

 

The Mind Trust New-school incubation, talent recruitment “We saw relatively quickly that progress would always be limited without a focus on a human capital strategy,” says David Harris, the founding CEO of The Mind Trust. Like many industrial cities, Indianapolis had suffered from years of brain drain, as talented young people left for greater economic opportunity. To address this profound challenge, Harris recruited Teach for America and The New Teacher Project (now TNTP) to bring new teachers—and especially entrepreneurial leaders—to Indianapolis. The early strategy created Education Entrepreneur Fellowships to attract non-educators to the city. Fellows receive a $20,000 stipend plus full salary and benefits for two years to develop their idea for a new school or nonprofit. The Mind Trust moved quickly toward supporting teams rather than individuals through what became an intensive school-incubation process: designing, building, and launching new schools. The organization has helped create 12 new public charter schools and, in partnership with the school district, 17 innovation network schools. It has helped create nearly a dozen new nonprofit school-support organizations and placed more than 1,500 teachers in city schools. As the city’s needs have evolved, so has The Mind Trust. Community engagement activity has progressed from a “grasstops” strategy that engages respected civic leaders in education to a grassroots approach that focuses on building widespread support. The organization has partnered with the United Negro College Fund to provide bus tours for local residents that showcase effective practices in Indianapolis charter schools and to host community discussions. The Mind Trust has increasingly concentrated on instructional quality and professional development for existing schools. It also supports the school system through such initiatives as the creation of a unified enrollment system; Teach Indy (a collaboration between The Mind Trust, the schools, and the mayor’s office to recruit effective educators to the city); and a new effort to explore how charter schools can work with the school system on special education. More than $100 million in funding has underwritten these activities, and some of Indy’s most prominent business and civic leaders sit on the organization’s board.

Since the nation’s first charter-school law was passed in 1991, charter schools throughout the United States have enjoyed steady and relatively rapid growth. Today, they serve more than three million students nationwide—nearly three times as many students as a decade ago. In cities like New Orleans and Detroit, which have especially robust charter sectors, more students attend charters than district schools.

But the rate of growth is slowing. Until 2013, the total number of U.S. charter schools was increasing by 6 to 8 percent each year. Since then, that number has fallen steadily, to less than 2 percent in 2016 (see Figure 1). At the same time, waiting lists remain long for many charter schools, and their overall academic performance is strong. So why is growth slowing, and what can charter leaders, policymakers, and communities do to regain momentum and keep pace with demand?

To explore this question, we study charter growth in a single region as a case study: the Bay Area, which includes San Francisco and the cities, suburbs, and rural areas that surround it. California is one of the nation’s leading charter-school states, and charters have boomed in the Bay Area in particular. The area also is in the midst of a five-year decline in the rate of charter growth, mirroring the national trend. We survey charter operators and analyze the policy environment, market forces, and other dynamics contributing to an overall slowdown in expansion.

Our study finds that charter schools are encountering a set of interlocking barriers to growth that essentially reflect the price of success. As charters have become a more significant presence, especially in their target cities, they are encountering scarce facilities, increased competition with one another, and heightened political opposition. These intense new dynamics exacerbate the already challenging realities of a maturing sector: after a period of rapid expansion, many charter networks are also choosing to pause growth to attend to internal needs, including improving instruction and talent development. These conditions call for a range of interventions to restore strong charter growth, such as new measures to expand access to school facilities, increased coordination among charter operators, and stronger partnerships between charters, local districts, and state officials.

While the specific factors constraining growth in the Bay Area may not be strictly relevant elsewhere, they do shed light on factors potentially at play in multiple settings nationwide. And with an estimated half million students on waiting lists across the United States, breaking through barriers to more quickly expand high-quality charters is an urgent need.

After a Charter Boom

Charter schools have a relatively long history in California, where the state legislature first authorized them in 1992. Several aspects of that law made it one of the fastest-growing charter states. Unlike many other states, charter growth is not tightly capped, with an additional 100 schools allowed to open each year. Local school districts are the primary authorizer for most charters, but charter schools can also be approved by their county or the state board of education if rejected by their district. This diverse pool of authorizers, loose cap, and strong appeals process work together to ensure applications are not arbitrarily denied. Today, California has the largest charter-school enrollment and greatest number of charter schools in the country, with 630,000 students at 1,275 schools statewide.

Charters have flourished in particular in the Bay Area, the five-county region we focus on in our study: Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara. The region includes 108 school districts in all, which enrolled 834,000 students in 2016-17. While demographics differ from county to county, each one serves a majority of non-white students and significant populations of students who are economically disadvantaged and enrolled in English Language Learner programs. There are currently 178 charter schools, serving about 10 percent of all students. Some 110 charter schools were part of a network or management organization, while 68 schools were freestanding.

While individual school performance varies, charter schools generally outperform district schools in the Bay Area. In a 2015 report, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that the average charter-school student in the Bay Area attained significantly more growth in reading and math than similar students in nearby district schools—and that this difference increased the longer he or she stayed in a charter school. In addition, a 2016 analysis by Innovate Public Schools found the majority of Bay Area public schools achieving above-average results for low-income Latino and African American students were charter schools. Demand for charters has remained strong, based on data from schools’ self-reported waiting lists. A 2015 study by Bellwether Education Partners found 91,000 students on charter school waiting lists in California as a whole, including 2,261 in Oakland.

However, the pace of new charter school openings and enrollment growth in the Bay Area has slowed in recent years (see Figure 2). New schools continue to open each year, but the rate slowed considerably from its peak in 2012–13, when more than 18 percent additional students enrolled compared to the previous year. Since then, the sector has added fewer students every year, enrolling about 4 percent additional students in 2017–18. Non-charter enrollment in the Bay Area has been almost flat during the same period.

We set out to learn what factors are inhibiting charter growth in the Bay Area, and to identify how they can be addressed. Our goal was to confirm or deny the many hypotheses that could explain the slowdown, and determine what strategies would support faster growth.

We conducted telephone interviews with representatives from organizations that operate 74 different Bay Area charter schools, taking care to seek evidence and to corroborate with other interviews as a check on individual views. We examined data on school authorizations, openings, closings, and enrollment, and reviewed information on Bay Area charter authorizers from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). Our research also included reviewing media coverage, public polling data, demographic data, and facilities leasing and purchasing information.

The available data were limited, and further analysis is needed to quantify more precisely some of the challenges we identify here. Still, we find clear, consistent barriers to charter school growth: a lack of access to affordable school buildings, increased competition among charter schools for students and resources, and a political backlash to the growing presence of charter schools. We also identify areas that are not directly contributing to the recent slowdown, such as parent demand and the availability of trained teachers. Below, we detail the three major speed bumps along with interventions that our research suggests could help overcome them—both in the Bay Area and in communities facing similar challenges.

Barrier #1: Too Few School Facilities

The most immediate and overwhelming single factor constraining charter school growth in the Bay Area is a lack of access to affordable school buildings. This phenomenon is common across the United States, with charters fighting for space in high-cost cities without the legislative and financial supports that district schools enjoy (see “Whose School Buildings Are They, Anyway?” features, Fall 2012).

Facilities were named the primary reason that charters are not growing more quickly by the operators we interviewed and surveyed. The scarcity of school buildings acts as a hard cap on growth, because no matter what other assets a charter school has, no building means no school. As one charter leader said, “Our growth plan for the next year will be either 100 percent successful or 100 percent catastrophic if I don’t find a property in the next three months.”

Several factors contribute to the facilities squeeze, including the high cost of real estate and a policy environment in which district leaders can more easily access commercial real estate than charter leaders. Buildings in the Bay Area that are suitable for school facilities are both limited and expensive, making it very difficult to find affordable long-term leases on the private market. The logical buildings to look to, then, are those owned by local school districts.

A 2000 state initiative was supposed to help. California Proposition 39 compels districts to provide facilities for students within their boundaries who attend charter schools. But too often, the buildings made available to them are insufficient for charters’ needs. And because the rule mandates that districts provide facilities only for students who live within the district, charter schools that serve students from multiple districts often are offered facilities that cannot house all of the students in their school.

Alternatively, districts are required to give local charters first refusal to rent or purchase “surplus” space or buildings. But that option is only helpful when districts identify “surplus” space, and charter operators report that many have been unwilling to share their facilities or consolidate under-enrolled schools in order to do so.

Further complicating matters, Proposition 39 only requires districts to issue one-year leases, which are often inconvenient, inefficient, and expensive. For example, a charter school that serves 200 students might be offered two spaces capable of housing 100 students each in different buildings, sometimes not even near each other. Having disparate locations hampers school functions like student recruitment, school culture, and potentially, student learning and enrichment opportunities. And without long-term commitments, charters often have to move. One operator explained the burden this creates: “It’s hard to build continuity for staff and families if you don’t know by May where the school will be in August.”

Districts also have reportedly become more sophisticated about fighting Proposition 39 requests, and those bureaucratic delays can make it too time-consuming and expensive for a charter school to fight a resistant district for space. When district rental agreements are not available or renewed, and charter schools cannot secure another location, they must close.

Another facilities option is to rezone commercial buildings for school use, but again, the regulations in place make this far more difficult for charters than for school districts. While districts can exercise zoning exemptions to re-classify commercial properties as schools, charters cannot. And while districts could theoretically pursue rezoning on behalf of local charter schools, they reportedly hesitate to do so. As a result, whenever charter schools want to rezone a building for their use, they must go through a relatively arduous and uncertain city-level process, with costs that operators cited at upward of $65,000. Small operators often cannot overcome this barrier, and even large CMOs are significantly slowed by the added burden.

Finally, when schools do locate a facility, upfront costs can be prohibitive for schools that do not have the per-pupil revenue base or donor support to finance renovations. Such dauntingly high costs can cause larger schools to delay facilities investments by years. While state aid under Senate Bill 740 (SB740) does support some facilities expense, that program is not currently sufficient to offset the true cost. One operator described the situation neatly: “District Prop 39 policies are prohibitive, and the market is crazy. It’s like trying to find a unicorn—financially and logistically an incredible challenge.”

Solutions

While Proposition 39 acts as an important “foot in the door,” it remains an insufficient solution to charters’ challenges. Legislation to update and tighten the rules could help, particularly legislation requiring multi-year leases, and requiring districts to guarantee space large enough for all students in a local charter school, regardless of their home district. Implementing an arbitration process would help lend stability and timeliness to an otherwise uncertain dispute process.

We see other potential legislative or regulatory fixes as well. Mandating that districts house charter students before the district seeks bond funding could help relieve facility shortages. Allowing charter schools to access the zoning exemptions that districts use to turn commercial facilities into schools would also open up more options. Zoning flexibility for schools with non-traditional approaches (like small-group instruction or one-to-one blended learning models) would make it easier for innovative schools to find space that fits their needs, such as using office occupancy standards instead of the usual school standards for rezoning. And retooling SB740 to keep better pace with charters’ facilities costs could also help.

Ultimately, the growth of charters will be fundamentally constrained as long as districts fail to consolidate or close under-enrolled district schools. Serious attention needs to go into developing a strategy that mandates or creates incentives for these actions and provides political backing to district and board officials. The state could offer “consolidation grants” to districts willing to use their space to maximum efficiency; levy a “tax” on districts with unutilized space, for failing to use public buildings to public benefit; or take building ownership rights away from districts that fail to manage them efficiently. Or the state could simply require that districts that fail to reduce costs responsibly get out of the property-ownership business, either by having the state assume ownership, by placing the buildings into a third-party trust, or by establishing a cooperative to which charter schools have equal rights.

Barrier #2: Internal Challenges

New charters in the Bay Area—particularly in Oakland—are spending a lot of time and energy competing with other charter schools for facilities and resources. In interviews, leaders point to fierce competition for the few available and affordable buildings, as well as missed opportunities to coordinate on common issues like staff recruitment. And because there are so many high-quality management organizations interested in expansion, little attention has been paid to providing support and incubation for new school operators. For example, we spoke to one community member whose group had managed to navigate the politics of the application process and get approved at the state level after being denied at the district and county levels, only to find they couldn’t secure a facility.

Charter advocates in the Bay Area seem to subscribe to a “survival of the fittest” ethic, which holds that because running a successful charter school requires so much capacity, if potential operators are scared off from pursuing an application without a lot of handholding, it’s probably for the best. This was a reasonable strategy in the early days when the supply of savvy entrepreneurs was plentiful and charters were booming, but it may be time to look deeper for quality operators and provide more support.

Larger management organizations, which have traditionally fueled a major portion of Bay Area charter expansion, are increasingly rethinking their growth plans in order to refine and improve their models. For some, recent results from new Common Core–aligned tests were a wake-up call that their students were not learning concepts deeply enough. Other organizations are dealing with labor issues, such as stepped-up efforts by the California Teachers Association to organize charter school teachers. And many organizations are shifting toward sharing knowledge with district-run schools rather than simply growing as many schools as quickly as possible. At least two well-recognized Bay Area management organizations have recently decided against further expansion for the time being, and are instead starting consulting efforts or creating structured professional-development workshops and materials for district-run schools.

Overall, most charter leaders we spoke to felt that start-up funding is reasonably easy to secure, especially for school networks with a strong track record of success. However, because of the political and facilities impediments described above, the rising cost of doing business has made substantial growth untenable for most charter schools. Smaller management organizations and standalone schools in particular lack the resources and connections to fight the various battles required to grow.

Meanwhile, the funding community is not sufficiently supporting these smaller players to make it worth their while. In interviews, many leaders told us they believe that the Bay Area’s supply of effective schools is limited today by the philanthropic funding strategies used in the past. In particular, there is a consistent perception that single-site schools and school leaders of color who are not tied into local funder networks have historically not been connected to dominant funding channels.

Further hampering growth, the charter leaders we interviewed said that start-up dollars are the hardest to come by in the communities they consider most viable for charter school expansion. Operators are finding it easy to access philanthropic funding in urban Oakland and San Francisco, but see those places as “over-saturated” and gentrifying. By contrast, in the less urban area of western Contra Costa County, there are more available facilities and a growing population of students that match most charter schools’ target populations—but fewer opportunities to access philanthropic dollars to start up new schools.

As one charter-school operator said, “People are moving farther and farther away from cities [because they can’t afford to live there] and into poor-performing school districts. An organization like KIPP—if they want to double in the next five years—they’ll need to go in these areas. But charters are not going there because there is no funding there.”

Solutions

Charters share common challenges and can coordinate to support common solutions. A legal action fund to promote sector-wide interests in the Bay Area and to engage in lawsuits around Prop 39 and other barriers to growth could benefit all charter schools, especially the small schools that don’t have the resources to engage in protracted legal battles.

Funders should consider supporting growth where charter operators believe the need is greatest and barriers to entry are low. No data exist on the prevalence of charter leaders of color, so we have no way to assess the impact of past or present funding efforts. It may be time to start collecting these data and to create even more avenues for identifying and supporting promising school and management organization founders who are not on funders’ radars.

A centralized process or organization to help single-site schools and small networks outsource facilities searches, such as through the state charter-school association, could also help ease a shared burden. In addition, small operators would benefit if start-up costs were supported with more subsidies or loan programs, or with more philanthropic support. Many facilities funding programs are lease or reimbursement programs that rely on schools raising funds or collateral, but upfront funds remain elusive.

Barrier #3: Political Backlash

Political opposition has always been a reality for charters, but leaders we interviewed report that it is growing, in part because of national politics and in part because of local resistance to the charters’ expanding presence and the perceived fiscal impact on districts.

Districts facing financial strains often see charters as responsible for their challenges (whether this perception is accurate or not). As a result, charter growth becomes an enemy of district financial security in the minds of some school boards. In response, districts have become skilled at limiting charter growth, not only by blocking access to facilities but also by bringing lawsuits against growing schools and making charters’ compliance with state regulations more difficult. In addition, charters are being asked to jump through bureaucratic hoops and comply with complex public-records requests and onerous administrative requirements, which one leader described as “death by a thousand cuts.”

Teachers unions also have reportedly stepped up their resistance strategies and are increasingly coordinating opposition campaigns with local school districts and attorneys. Statewide advertising campaigns and targeted local resistance efforts are increasingly common nationwide. An annual poll by Education Next in 2017 showed that public support for charter schools has recently fallen, particularly among Democrats, and opposition has grown (see “The 2017 EdNext Poll on School Reform,” features, Winter 2018).

On the other hand, charter advocacy also is on the rise, often resulting in successful campaigns for school board races. By one accounting, the California Charter Schools Association spent more than $12 million on candidates for school board and other races in 2016 and 2017. Also in 2017, charter advocates celebrated the successful election of two charter-friendly board members to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), leading to a reform-friendly board majority. The Oakland and San Francisco boards have seen similar electoral shifts.

Solutions

Diffusing political fights isn’t a matter of just winning elections. Truly stabilizing charters’ role and ensuring their expansion can keep pace with demand calls for a new way of thinking about the charter–district school relationship. One interviewee suggested that the Bay Area would do well to help district leaders think of their jobs as overseeing a broad portfolio of educational options with various governance models, to potentially include having all schools operate with charter-like autonomies. As one charter authorizer said: “If there’s one thing I could change, it would be portfolio management. If a district [leader] can go to bed each day and think, ‘what we can do for our kids?’ If the kid goes to a district or charter shouldn’t matter.”

This sort of thinking could be especially helpful in addressing the facilities challenge. One possibility would be to found an independent commission of civic leaders empowered to advise district authorizers on where to place new charters. This commission would help site new charters in underserved neighborhoods and minimize competition for scarce facilities, for example. It is crucial that such a commission is impartial to the self-interest of particular networks and district self-interests, and base facilities decisions on school quality, student need, and efficient usage.

The Cleveland Transformation Alliance (CTA) provides something of an example of what’s possible. The independent CTA is governed by a board of representatives from Cleveland’s mayor’s office, the school district, multiple charter operators, and local community organizations. The board monitors school quality, provides information to families, and tracks the overall portfolio of options. Less formally, more than 20 cities, through the Gates Foundation–funded District-Charter Collaboration Compacts, have established cooperative working groups focused on a range of topics, such as solving shared problems, addressing gaps in service across sectors for students and families, and sharing innovative practices.

Fueling Faster Charter Growth

It may be that, to help charters grow, we must first help districts cope with their particular challenges, including legacy costs. This issue is causing significant pain in places like San Jose and Oakland, which might otherwise be open to more charter schools.

We have recently suggested potential “grand bargains” between districts, state education agencies, and charter operators that might work to pool their strengths to address one another’s challenges, in a 2017 paper titled “Better Together.” In such arrangements, the state might grant funding or loosen rules for districts and charters that want to become more nimble and work in partnership with one another. For example, charters might gain access to facilities or special education supports, and would help contribute to a fund to buy down pension obligations in exchange.

Already, some cities are finding political advantage in creating “hybrid” or “partnership” schools that have the full autonomy of a charter school but operate on contract with districts within district-provided buildings, generally created by state legislation. Examples include schools in Indianapolis; Tulsa; Atlanta; and Camden, New Jersey. Besides gaining access to district buildings, these schools also tend to attract principals and teachers who like the idea of working more closely with districts and being part of systemic reform. These new models also help address the problems of saturation and economies of scale by operating in collaboration with the district. There are potential downsides, such as the risk of diluted autonomy and accountability, but given the intensity of the challenge in the Bay Area and cities across the U.S., this could be a good option to explore.

Even beyond so-called “grand bargains,” many of these paths forward will be challenging, requiring a greater deal of coordination and collaboration from districts, charter operators, funders, and other stakeholders than is the current custom. But through innovation and cooperation, charter schools in the Bay Area and beyond can nurture a second generation of impact, both in the students they serve and the broader systemic improvements they inspire.

What Comes Next After Easy Growth Ends

Our study has revealed a Bay Area charter sector that, now well into its second decade, must adjust to its own maturity. At the most basic level, Bay Area charters have simply been priced out of a very expensive facilities market. That is a critical issue, but the story is complicated by a set of interlocking factors that are, in part, the natural outgrowth of what has been a very successful school-improvement movement and, in part, a normal maturation process. Facilities scarcity, driven by political discord between charters and districts, puts a hard cap on charter growth. Funder preferences for certain locales, combined with the failure of districts to adjust to enrollment loss, create a pressure cooker for political backlash. The supply of operators is constrained by authorizers and funding decisions, as well as by reliance on highly motivated and savvy management organizations to singlehandedly provide most of the needed schools. Meanwhile, those organizations are experiencing growing pains of their own.

The easy days of Bay Area, and possibly national, charter growth may be over. Anyone serious about finding a way to meet the still-desperate need for better education in the region can’t afford to sit back and hope the old strategies will eventually work. While there are many potential paths forward to reinvigorate the growth of quality charter schools in the Bay Area, doing so will require new ideas and new strategic investments.

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell, where Roohi Sharma is research coordinator and Alice Opalka is special assistant to the director. Trey Cobb is a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame and a middle-school math teacher.

This article is adapted from “The Slowdown in Bay Area Charter School Growth: Causes and Solutions,” Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2018