Lessons learned from success and failure in charter schools

Closing any school is hard and has real fallout: (hat tip: Neerav Kingsland)

In 2012, Sci and STA graduated their first senior classes. Nearly 95% of Sci seniors will attend four year universities and 88% will be the first generation in their family to do so. STA seniors did not fare as well. Less than 30% of STA students were on grade level by the end of 2011. The school suffered from high rates of suspensions, expulsions, and dropouts – and it barely avoided mid-year bankruptcy. For STA, its first graduating class of seniors will be its last: the State announced it would revoke the charter and close the school. NSNO supported this decision – the school was not serving kids at the level they deserved.

"Sci" is Sci Academy, a charter high school in New Orleans. (Personal note: two fellow Philly '05 TFAers are on staff at Sci. They are awesome and have a lot of which to be proud.) "STA" is Sojourner Truth Academy, another charter high school operating in the same area. "NSNO" is New Schools for New Orleans, an organization that helps launch charter schools.

Some of the lessons learned are worth noting:

• Success is 80% Selection: 
After five years of launching schools – and seeing such different results with founders who completed the exact same training – we have come to believe that leadership selection is (almost) everything. Training can be effective and is crucially important.  But in order for training to be useful, you need the right leaders in place.

• We Need to Get Better at Selection: 
NSNO does not yet fully know what makes an excellent charter leader. We’ve learned some essential characteristics and this has affected our selection model—but for the most part, the maturation of the charter market has allowed us to be increasingly selective in considering past performance rather than behaviors, skills, and beliefs. We now put more emphasis on historical, quantitative evidence of the founder’s ability to raise student achievement and give less weight to our more subjective opinions on leadership ability.

I've worked for my fair share of principals and can testify that the right leadership makes a huge difference. That said, many different types of leaders can successfully run a school. 

New Schools' increased emphasis on a track record at the expense of resumé or how a candidate comes across in an interview makes me think of the observations about how even highly-paid general managers could mis-value professional baseball players in Michael Lewis' Moneyball:

“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?”

...and this one....

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”   

I'd be interested to see New Schools' revised model for selecting school leaders. 

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Separately, all of us need to be mindful of the the stakes of this business:

Closure is Necessary, Harmful: Students at STA suffered real harm by enrolling in the school. The last year was especially troubling. Keeping the school open would not have been in the best interest of the future high school children who might enroll. But now the rising juniors and seniors will have to transition to new high schools. And those that have spent time at STA – especially those who graduated this spring – have lost four years of their educational lives. There is perhaps an additional lesson here – the more able charter boards are to recognize failure, the greater ability they will have to voluntarily close schools early on in the school’s existence.

The silver lining here isn't much, but at least public dollars can be redirected to an effort that isn't a proven failure. I know of too many schools that have been serving students terribly for decades and continue to be a poor investment of public resources.

Still, closing a school is tough on kids. I support closing failing charter schools, but it sure is one of those "worst except for the alternative" sort of options.