The public charter school sector was designed to be responsive and innovative, operating in a space freed from the bogged-down bureaucracy that so often hampers other public schools. Each new public charter school embodies the vision of many, offering an exciting opportunity to do something new, great, and responsive to a community’s priorities.

If we want charters to be responsive and groundbreaking, we can’t inadvertently force their founding teams to conform to the standardized boxes the sector has created for them.

Over the  years, applications for new charter schools have morphed into a massive amount of standardized, written information, in answer to pages upon pages of questions. Some of that information is critical to quality decisions and quality schools; other information—not so much, or not needed at that early juncture.

During the last few years, NACSA has partnered up with authorizers and other education leaders to rethink what’s really needed to make good decisions on new school applications. We wrestled with how a school gets reviewed and approved to understand what is needed at the application phase and what can come later, to prevent excessive and unneeded expectations from becoming a barrier to potential founding teams applying in the first place. We’ve had tough conversations about how to right-size application requirements to create space for new ideas and people while protecting quality.

Soon, we’ll release redesigned New School Application Guidance and tools that reflect all this work—the hard-won lessons of schools and authorizers from the first quarter-century of authorizing. The new guidance centers accountability (as it always has), while putting people ahead of paper in this application process.

We need more excellent schools. Strong founding teams put their hearts and souls into creating a school to uniquely and successfully serve the aspirations and needs of students in their communities. Let’s give them the best opportunity to share how they plan to do so.