By Rachel Hannah, Arizona State Board for Charter Schools

As an authorizer, there are many things that I care about in our work with charter schools to ensure they provide an excellent education to students in our communities.

But some things stand above the rest. Our office is constantly working to balance school autonomy and accountability, with a focus on currently operating schools. We also regularly consider—or we try to—how to reduce regulatory burden, to give these schools more time and space to focus on teaching and learning, while ensuring they achieve great outcomes.

But what about applying these rock-solid authorizing principles—balancing autonomy and accountability, and reducing regulatory burdens—in our work with new school applicants?

For years, our office has asked ourselves how to improve our new school application process:

• How can we reduce the application length, yet ensure approved schools are ready to open?
• How can we encourage more innovative applicants to apply?
• Why do some applicants who score well and demonstrate capacity throughout our process still struggle when their schools open?

We didn’t have the answers. And we weren’t sure how to make changes.

Fortunately, in late 2022, I was invited to join NACSA’s Leadership in Action Cohort, which focused on these questions and more. I hoped this cohort would provide me with the knowledge, support, and time to tackle our questions and move forward with thoughtful and meaningful changes.

For 18 months, the cohort examined NACSA’s Recommendations for Rethinking the New School Application in great detail. Over zoom and in person, with too much coffee and just the right amount of camaraderie, each participant was given the freedom to determine how they could apply these new perspectives and knowledge back in their own authorizing office.

We weren’t in a position to tackle NACSA’s recommendations wholesale: we knew we had to start small. So, we chose two things to explore: 1) how to reduce the length of our written application and 2) how to place a greater emphasis on assessing the capacities of the team submitting the application—an essential deciding factor outlined in our state statute. For our 2024 cycle, we weren’t yet ready to make substantive changes to the written application. Instead, we leaned into a singular focus on the people and their capacities, utilizing NACSA’s resource, The Capacities of Charter School Founding Teams: How to Identify and Assess for School Success, as our foundation.

What did leaning into this look like? Rather than using a single interview to assess capacities, we began to track them over our nine-month application cycle. Our team offered meetings at specific touch points throughout the cycle, answering applicant questions with the intent of not only evaluating—but also giving them opportunities to build—their capacities. We paid attention to whether teams had gaps in knowledge or skills, and whether they were able to take and effectively use feedback to improve their written proposal. We didn’t focus on all nine capacities NACSA identifies; we focused on four: Reflective Learning; Creative Problem Solving; Team Awareness; and Knowledge, Skills, and Execution.

Our new approach paid off. We learned a ton about the capacities of each team. Our staff ended the cycle with a better understanding of the many ways to assess capacities, how to more effectively utilize interviews, and the importance of building relationships in the application process. Our decision making was stronger. We will now see how the approved schools move through the ready-to-open process and how applicants that were not approved respond.

Although the Leadership in Action Cohort has ended, the work in our office continues, as does our collaboration with NACSA and colleagues across the country. We are striving to create a stronger, more purposeful new school application and ready-to-open process, with the goal of preparing applicants in their foundational years to achieve strong outcomes for students. We now have a better handle on assessing the capacities of the founding team, and we are ready to tackle ways to reduce the paper burden of the application. We are indeed shifting rigor from paper to people, and we are confident that, over time, this will result in more diverse schools that are responsive to communities in Arizona.

Want to hear more about Rachel’s experience?

Listen to her discuss her approach to the new school application with David Greenberg, NACSA’s Vice President of Authorizer Learning and Development.