For charter school authorizers, alternative education campuses (or AECs) can be a challenge. Standard measures such as academic proficiency rates and graduation rates may not say much about AECs actual quality or effectiveness. Students tend to be highly mobile, far below grade level in reading and math, and difficult to measure as comparative data is scarce or non-existent. Students also tend to have multiple high-risk factors, such as being chronically absent, in the juvenile justice system, pregnant or parenting, and experiencing or having experienced trauma.

The National Charter School Institute and Momentum Strategy & Research have joined forces to create the “A-GAME”: Advancing Great Authorizing & Modeling Excellence to support charter school authorizers measure the quality and effectiveness of alternative education campuses.

Supported by a  U.S. Department of Education dissemination grant, the A-GAME is improving charter authorizing for AECs has four areas of focus:

• Develop and disseminate impactful resources
• Build a comprehensive dataset of AEC performance,
• Provide interactive data visualizations of publicly available data, and
• Facilitate Regional Networks for Charter School Authorizers

By sharing best-practices, research, outcome-based targets, and promoting outside-the-box thinking, the A-GAME is changing the way charter school authorizers evaluate AEC quality and effectiveness.

This U.S. Department of Education: Summary of Meeting Grant Objectives grant submission illustrates the progress the A-GAME has made toward meeting its objectives, set forth when we began on this journey. The document provides descriptions of the thought behind the deliverables and the plans around broad dissemination.