Advancing great authorizing
The U.S. Department of Education awarded the Institute a three-year federal grant for $2.2 million to strengthen authorizing, encourage innovation, and promote rigorous and personalized performance measures.
The grant is called the “A-Game” – Advancing Great Authorizing & Modeling Excellence. It has a special focus on developing holistic performance measures that authorizers can use to oversee and evaluate schools that predominately serve alternative student populations.
Guided by a National Authorizer Leadership Team composed of experienced charter school authorizers, this grant will have national significance because of its groundbreaking work on mission-related performance measures and its focus on helping authorizers become performance-based agents of change and catalysts for excellence.
Willing to challenge the givens, these experienced authorizers compose the grant’s National Authorizer Leadership Team:
The heart behind it
“Our public schools serve students with a diverse range of needs and yet many authorizers are using a one-size-fits-all approach to accountability. This grant will allow us to leverage the experience and expertise that exists throughout the country to develop and disseminate prototypes for how to better measure and evaluate the performance of mission-driven schools. This work will help students and families make more informed choices and provide taxpayers with the assurance that these schools are delivering results.”
Dr. James Goenner | President and CEO | National Charter Schools Institute
“Serving as the project director for this grant provides a powerful opportunity to shape the future on how to best measure student and school performance. We will be relentless about developing and sharing solutions that are best in class as we work with these leading authorizers and our partners at Momentum Strategy and Research.”
Cheri Shannon | Chief Strategy Officer | National Charter Schools Institute
Grant details
The “A-Game” project will convene a National Authorizer Leadership Team, which includes 11 experienced and well-respected authorizers, to capture and share best practices for evaluating alternative schools. Among other activities, this group will work with a National Advisory Committee of industry leaders to identify new ideas that authorizers can use to transform their oversight beyond compliance checklists to a more rigorous and personalized approach that focuses on outcomes for students.
The final year of the grant will be focused on creating a resource library and disseminating strategies and practices that support the replication and expansion of high-quality charter schools, improve the performance measures found in charter contracts and share models of excellence, particularly for new and small authorizers.
“This grant will help all charter public schools and their authorizers build smart and strong practices for children. The resources will impact our abilities to serve hundreds of thousands of students through robust and authentic sharing of what successful charter teachers and students are achieving every day.”