New School Application Guidance
A new era for New School Applications
We’ve made big changes to our New School Application Guidance. Over the years, authorizing practice has added more and more to the written submission requirements for a potential new school. The application process has become less about school founders demonstrating a compelling vision and plan, along with the capacities to launch and sustain a school. Instead, it has become an exercise of submitting an overwhelming amount of written information with the correct answers to an almost never-ending set of questions.
This has made the public charter school sector more bureaucratic, more rigid, and less innovative—exactly what it was designed not to be.
Learn more about NACSA’s work, advocating for a change:
Recommendations
We spent several months learning how to improve the application process. This set of recommendations is where we started.
In early 2025, we will release an updated Model Charter School Application, to strengthen the application process.
For more information contact David Greenberg: [email protected]