Charter schools as collaborative partners rather than competitors

Yesterday afternoon I attended the regular meeting of the core leadership team of the CREATE Teacher Residency Program.  With representatives from Georgia State University’s College of Education and Human Development, staff members working across the program’s member schools, and consultants who assist in the program’s professional learning for educators, this team has helped to support CREATE (which stands for “Collaboration and Reflection to Enhance Atlanta Teacher Effectiveness”) as it has expanded from a program operating only at ANCS to one that now involves over a dozen public schools in and around the Maynard Jackson cluster in southeast Atlanta.

CREATE is the most visible example of ANCS’s broader long-term effort to serve as a partner and collaborator with neighboring schools as opposed to a “competitor”.  I use those specific terms because they represent different ways of thinking about how charter schools–public schools afforded greater flexibility and autonomy in exchange for different accountability requirements–might positively influence public education on a larger scale.  Many are of the opinion that the existence of charter schools creates choice-based competition that ultimately can increase the educational benefits for all students through simple marketplace principles.  Of course, others point to examples where charter schools have not had a demonstrable impact on student learning in the surrounding district and, in fact, may be stretching the resources of the local district thin by their presence.  There are compelling (and complicated) arguments on both sides of this debate.  

At ANCS, we aim to position ourselves more as partners with other public schools for reasons that are both practical and philosophical.  We have not expanded the size of our school, added grade levels, or replicated to open additional campuses through the years despite demand and even incentives to do so.  We’ve made this decision in part because we don’t feel we have the capacity to increase the scope and scale of our work without diluting what we do best as a school: creating a personalized learning environment for students based on knowing each one well.  But we have also stayed small as a school because we believe we can manage a much bigger impact on public education by collaborating with other schools. We don’t strive to “add more seats” or operate as a competitive force because those approaches are ultimately limited in the number of students they can affect.  Instead, we see that there can be an exponentially greater result that comes from learning with and from the schools around us and together taking collective responsibility for all of our students.

So how do we do this?  

CREATE (which you can learn more about on our website) builds connections among a range of schools and institutions to deepen teacher development through partnership supported by several million dollars in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Georgia’s Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, and a host of private foundations.  CREATE grew out of ANCS’s Center for Collaborative Learning (CCL) which helps to facilitate learning about what education based on our school’s principles can look like.  In the past few years, the CCL has organized visits to ANCS by over a hundred interested educators from many different schools, allowing them to see what we do and talk more deeply about it with our teachers and staff.  The CCL has also hosted workshops, film screenings, and other events designed to spark discussion about teaching and learning.

While much of the attention on charter schools over the past 25 years has been on the “competition” angle, there is an increasing number of examples of collaboration between charter schools and school districts.  I hope that the work we do at ANCS helps to add to that part of the story.