Guest Post: Kevin Hall, President & CEO, Charter School Growth Fund
As we navigate our decisions in our daily lives, we know that having the ability to make good choices is fundamentally critical to achieving our goals. In K-12 for far too long, we have not provided all parents and students in our country with the ability to be able to choose among a set of high-quality school options. However, it’s not enough just to provide choice; we must aim to provide excellent options for all parents and students that enable them to fulfill their dreams. With the release this week of our report Replicating Quality, the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) and NACSA are providing a roadmap of interconnected strategies for systematically improving the quality of the charter school sector and increasing the number of high-performing schools that serve many more students.
We need to focus on both accelerating the growth of high-performing charters, and ensuring the lowest performers close to open up the path for new great schools to emerge.
A growing number of excellent charter schools and networks are poised to expand, but they are constrained by unequal access to funding and facilities, or weak legislation and authorizing practices. These schools and their students are demonstrating outstanding performance, and they have proven that they can do even more. We owe our children the opportunity to attend a great school and to give their families a great choice.
The challenges are complex and the politics difficult, but there are some simple and straightforward steps we can take to move us forward. With partners such as NACSA sharing a common agenda, our goal is to help legislators, authorizers, and other policymakers build a policy environment that encourages the creation of more great schools. At CSGF, we have the opportunity to see firsthand how effective these schools are each day in our work, and we are excited to help invest in the creation of even more high-quality schools to meet the growing demand from parents across the country.
