Last night, the Atlanta Board of Education approved the renewal of our school’s charter for another five year term. Our charter renewal petition now goes to the Georgia Department of Education, and, pending approval there, ANCS will begin a new charter term next summer that will extend until June 2021, taking us right up to having been open for nearly 20 years.
As a school community, we should be immensely proud of all that’s been accomplished in the five years since the Neighborhood Charter School and Atlanta Charter Middle School merged to form the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School. In fact, in case you’ve forgotten all that’s been achieved, I’ve listed some of the highlights at the bottom of this post.
What I’d really like to emphasize in this post, though, are some changes we’ve made to the “accountability” goals in our charter renewal application. Every charter school in Georgia is required to meet or exceed certain accountability goals as determined by the Georgia Department of Education. The flexibility of operating free from many of the education policies is predicated on a charter school’s achievement of these goals.
As we worked on the renewal application for ANCS’s next five year term, we viewed the required accountability goals–focused mainly on student performance on Georgia’s standardized tests and on the state’s new CCRPI metric–as the minimum for which we should be aiming. In renewing our charter, we also wanted to renew our commitment to the Coalition of Essential Schools common principles and have those principles reflected in additional accountability goals we set for ourselves. These goals include:
- A focus on the whole child by assessing the growth of students’ depth of academic knowledge and skills by using the MAP and CogAT assessments but also their social-emotional health and well-being by using the Gallup Student Poll and our own internal surveys
- Fulfilling the original promise of charter schools to serve as “laboratories of innovation” by engaging in ongoing activities to collaborate and share best practices with other schools through our Center for Collaborative Learning
A school’s charter should be more than just boilerplate language; it should capture the hopes and aspirations of a community committed to using innovation to create better learning outcomes for students. With what we have articulated in our charter renewal application, it’s my hope that we can look back in five years confident that we have done just that.
Meeting and Exceeding the Goals from our 2011-2016 Charter Contract
Our current charter agreement included a goal to “demonstrate growth and increased rigor” on the Reading/ELA and Math tests of the CRCT by meeting or exceeding certain performance targets each year on those tests. Additionally, the agreement contains a goal for students to show growth on the Georgia Writing Tests. In addition to meeting those targets, ANCS students also outperformed district and state averages for those tests for each year of the current charter term in which those tests were administered as shown in the charts below:
Beating the Odds and CCRPI
Beginning in 2014, all charter schools were required to “beat the odds” when it came to performance on the state’s College and Career Readiness Performance Index (CCRPI). ANCS met the state’s “Beating the Odds” requirements and also exceeded the state and district CCRPI average scores by a large margin as indicated by the table below:
| 2014 CCRPI Scores | ANCS | APS | Georgia |
| Elementary (K-5) | 90.9 | 62.7 | 72.6 |
| Middle (6-8) | 80.9 | 65.7 | 73.2 |
ANCS 2014 CCRPI scores were in the top five of all APS elementary and middle schools, and in a year where scores for elementary schools statewide dropped by over 5 points and middle schools dropped by nearly 2 points, the ANCS elementary score held steady and the middle campus score increased by a full 7 points.
Additional Highlights from our 2011-2016 Charter Contract
In addition to meeting goals and objectives described above, we would like to note several other highlights from our current charter term:
- Named a finalist for Georgia “Charter School of the Year” in 2014 and 2015 by the Georgia Charter Schools Association and the recipient of the award in 2015 because of our school’s track record of “academic achievement, strong governance, and broad community impact”
- ANCS alumni have shown strong performance into high school. For example, on the 2014 End of Course Tests, ANCS alumni had a meets/exceeds rate an average of 19 points higher than the APS district average. Additionally, on those tests, if the cohort of ANCS alumni 9th graders in APS schools were their own high school, they would have been ranked in the following places out of all 26 APS high school programs administering these tests:
- 2nd highest performing on literature EOCT
- 5th highest performing on coordinate algebra EOCT
- 4th highest performing on biology EOCT
- Awarded a $1 million “Innovation Fund” grant from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement in 2011 to implement a unique new teacher residency program in partnership with Georgia State University
- Based on strong outcomes of residency program, awarded a $3 million “Investing in Innovation” (i3) development grant from the U.S. Education Department to expand program into several other area schools–traditional and charter–over the next five years. Program has also received over $400,000 in support from the R.H. Dobbs Foundation, Zeist Foundation, and Belk Foundation.
- Launched an innovative new “farm-to-school” program with supporting funds from the Aetna Foundation. Program provides students with nutritious and delicious school meals, allows them to help in the cultivation of food and development of recipes, and was highlighted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in November 2014.
- Disseminating our learning and assisting others in efforts at school improvement through presentations at 10 national conferences and through the work of our Center for Collaborative Learning which, in the past year, organized various educator visits, workshops, and institutes for over 80 educators from 11 different schools
- Awarded nearly $1 million in funding for building and grounds improvements from the Georgia Department of Education, Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, and the Sartain Lanier Family Foundation
- Several teachers have achieved local and national recognition, including the Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching
- Actively involved over 50 community members in our 8th grade portfolio exhibition assessment as a part of our commitment to making learning performance-based and public