What’s the point of charter schools if they’re not sharing what they are doing?

A few weeks ago at the Atlanta Public Schools monthly board meeting, during a presentation of the annual report on the district’s charter schools, an APS board member asked the head of the district’s Office of Innovation that oversees charter schools about how APS is facilitating learning between “traditional neighborhood” schools and charter schools in Atlanta.  I was happy to hear the response begin with lifting up our school, ANCS, as an example of this kind of collaboration happening effectively.  To me, it’s at the very core of what charter schools should be doing.

At their conception, charter schools were envisioned as an opportunity for teachers to try out innovative teaching practices and school structures for a short period of time that could then inform the public schools in which they worked.  By being granted flexibility and autonomy, these educators could experiment and lessons could be shared.  Unfortunately, as the concept of charter schools has evolved over the past 25 or so years, the emphasis on flexibility and autonomy remains while consistent efforts at sharing what’s been learned are few and far between.  Many charter school leaders and boards will say that governing and running a school that is essentially a multi-million dollars nonprofit leaves little time to think about how to bring what they are discovering from the endeavor to a wider audience.  And few school districts are doing much to push their charter schools to disseminate what they are doing to improve educational outcomes for students.

At ANCS—with the support of the Atlanta Public Schools—we have made shared learning with other public schools a central tenet of our school’s mission.  Through our Center for Collaborative Learning, we bring together individuals, school teams, and organizations to learn with and from one another about the best ways of creating and sustaining student-centered learning in our schools.  We host visits from educators, hold workshops grounded in ANCS practices, and have even provided ongoing coaching to schools.  Additionally, the flagship of our Center for Collaborative Learning—the CREATE Teacher Residency Program—fosters collaboration between ANCS and other are public schools to use innovative methods to support new teachers.  These efforts reflect a part of the DNA of a school that was founded by families and educators working together with the community to create a more hands-on learning environment.  At the same time, this is a strategic direction to which our school is committed because we believe we can make the greatest, broadest impact on student learning not by trying to open more campuses but by partnering with other schools to share our learning together to improve outcomes for all of our students.

A team of educators from Henry County (Ga) schools visits ANCS through the Center for Collaborative Learning.

In my opinion, charter schools—especially those that have been around for at least one charter term—should be required to outline a plan for sharing their learning with other schools as a condition of their charter’s ongoing existence.  After all, what’s the point of opening a charter school as a “lab for innovation” if those innovations are never meaningfully and effectively brought outside the walls of the charter school’s classroom?