What if Accountability and Innovation Aren’t Opposites?
Lessons from our work alongside the Colorado Charter School Institute
By Mary Bradley, Chief Operating Officer, National Charter Schools Institute
Across the country, charter school authorizers are being asked to hold several important responsibilities at once. They must protect students and public trust, establish clear expectations, hold schools accountable for results, respect school autonomy, and respond when traditional approaches are not reaching every student.
Those responsibilities can create real tension. How do you maintain a high bar without assuming every school should look the same? How do you give schools room to innovate without losing sight of accountability? How do you know when your own practices are helping schools succeed or simply adding more work?
Our recent work alongside the Colorado Charter School Institute (CSI) as it developed its 2026–2029 strategic plan, gave us the opportunity to work through those questions with an authorizer already serving a remarkably diverse group of schools.
Starting with Better Questions
CSI is Colorado’s statewide charter public school authorizer. Today, it serves 47 schools, more than 20,000 students, 24 communities, and 17 different educational models. Its portfolio includes rural schools, early college programs, Montessori models, career-connected learning, schools designed for students who learn differently, and programs built around the cultures and priorities of their communities.
That diversity made the strategic planning conversation interesting from the start. The CSI came into the process with a strong foundation, but its team was also willing to look closely at how its authorizing practices were working across very different schools.
How can an authorizer maintain high expectations without forcing every school into the same model? How should oversight respond to performance, context, and need while remaining fair and transparent? What conditions help schools improve? Where might an authorizer unintentionally be creating barriers?
These are not easy questions, but they are the questions strong authorizers must be willing to ask.
One of the things this process reinforced for me is that we usually do our best work when we resist the urge to walk in with the answer. The CSI already knew its schools and communities. Our job was to listen closely, ask questions that helped sharpen the thinking, challenge assumptions when it was useful, and help the team turn that thinking into a plan.
Differentiation Does Not Mean Lowering the Bar
One of the strongest ideas in the CSI’s approach is that consistency does not require all schools to be the same.
A rural school may face very different operational challenges compared to a large network serving students in an urban community. An alternative education campus may define progress differently from a traditional college preparatory school. A school designed for students with disabilities or neurodiverse learners may need measures that better reflect its model while still demonstrating meaningful student growth.
Treating those schools identically does not automatically make authorizing more rigorous. Sometimes it can make it more difficult to see what is actually happening.
The CSI has increasingly approached its work through a conditions-based lens, looking at the outcomes students need, the conditions schools require to reach those outcomes, the risks that must be managed, and the ways success can be measured without forcing every school into one definition of quality.
The standard does not change, but the response may. A school with strong performance and sound internal practices may appropriately have greater autonomy, while a school facing serious challenges may need closer monitoring, more direct expectations, or targeted support.
For me, that is an important distinction. Differentiation is not an excuse to expect less. It is about ensuring oversight is responsive enough to tell us what is really happening and what needs attention.
What Partnership Made Possible
The National Charter Schools Institute had the privilege of facilitating the CSI’s strategic planning process as its board, leadership, team members, and school leaders reflected on the organization’s values, authorizing practices, priorities, and responsibilities to students. Our role was to help create space and structure for open and honest conversation. We asked questions, helped identify areas of alignment, challenged assumptions when necessary, and supported the CSI in translating its experience and aspirations into a clear direction for the next several years.
The CSI’s board and team brought deep knowledge of what it means to authorize a statewide and highly diverse portfolio. School leaders added another perspective, sharing where things were working well and where they needed greater responsiveness or support. Our role was to create the structure for those conversations, identify areas of alignment, push where questions still needed to be answered, and help translate what we heard into a direction the organization could use.
The resulting 2026–2029 strategic plan connects four areas of work:
- Delivering excellent authorizing that strengthens schools and student outcomes
- Expanding access to high-quality and innovative schools
- Removing barriers and strengthening the conditions schools need to succeed
- Improving student outcomes across the portfolio
What I appreciate about those priorities is that they are not treated as separate initiatives. They connect back to the same underlying question: what does the CSI need to do well so more students can attend strong schools?
The CSI also established how it will measure progress through authorizer board oversight, annual leadership goals, school leader feedback, student outcome data, team culture measures, and regular reviews. Accountability was an important part of our conversations because the real value of a strategic plan is whether people continue to use it after the planning process ends. It guides decisions, sets priorities, and makes it easier to recognize when something needs to change.
Explore CSI’s full 2026–2029 strategic plan, Authorizing for Possibility. Building for Students. https://www.csi.state.co.us/about/our-board/strategic-plan/
What Possibility Looks Like in Practice
Some of the most clear examples of this thinking are already visible in CSI schools.
Kwiyagat Community Academy was created to serve students on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation through an Indigenous-centered educational program. Prospect Academy serves middle school students who learn differently, including many students with individualized education programs.
Both schools entered their first years with measures of success that reflected their models and communities. Rather than asking the schools to set those measures aside because they were not traditional, the CSI incorporated them into annual performance conversations. Some measures, including Ute language proficiency and social-emotional indicators, were later submitted for consideration within Colorado’s alternative education campus performance frameworks, and some were accepted.
Accountability did not disappear. What changed was the willingness to look carefully at what those schools were designed to accomplish and whether the measures being used could capture that work.
Another example came from AXIS International Academy, where transportation was limiting families’ ability to access the school. Instead of committing scarce resources to a transportation model it could not sustain, AXIS developed a reimbursement program to help families offset transportation costs. The approach supported enrollment and attendance while responding to a very practical local problem.
I like this example because innovation can sound much bigger or more complicated than it needs to be. Sometimes meaningful change begins with noticing what is getting in the way for students and families and being willing to rethink it.
The Authorizer’s Role Is Bigger Than Compliance
At its best, authorizing is not simply a process for determining whether schools have completed the right forms or followed a prescribed sequence of steps. Compliance matters. Public accountability matters. Financial stewardship, organizational strength, and academic performance all matter, but the work cannot end there.
Authorizers influence the conditions in which schools operate. Their timelines, reporting systems, communication practices, intervention decisions, and approach to partnership affect how much time and energy school leaders have available for students. An authorizer should not run a school or remove appropriate expectations, but should be willing to examine their own practices with the same seriousness expected from the schools they oversee.
The CSI’s strategic plan makes a direct commitment to reducing unnecessary administrative and operational burdens so schools can focus more fully on students. It also commits to improving support for small and emerging schools, advocating for more equitable conditions, and building partnerships that increase school capacity. This is an important shift in perspective.
During the planning process, the conversation was not only about what they needed schools to do. They also spent time thinking about what they needed to do better, so schools had clear expectations and more capacity to focus their energy on students. That change in perspective is worth paying noting.
The question is not only, “What must the school do?” The authorizer must also ask, “What must we do better so schools have the clarity, capacity, and conditions to succeed?”
What the Field Can Learn
The CSI’s strategic plan reflects the organization’s history, context, schools, communities, and aspirations.
Strong authorizing requires clarity about the outcomes that matter most. It requires discipline to maintain high expectations and the judgment to recognize that schools may reach those outcomes through different approaches. It requires listening to school leaders without giving up the responsibility to make difficult decisions. It requires authorizers to examine the systems they control, not only the schools they oversee. It also requires a clear connection between the daily work of authorizing and the students that work is ultimately intended to serve.
Are we clear about the outcomes that matter most? Do our practices allow us to recognize quality across different school models? Are we listening closely enough to understand where schools need greater support or direction? And are we examining the things we control rather than looking only at the organizations we oversee?
One sentence appeared throughout the CSI’s planning process: Students must remain at the center of every decision we make.
It is easy to agree with that statement. The harder part is using it when decisions become complicated. It asks us to consider whether a familiar process still serves its purpose, whether a requirement is giving us information we can effectively use, and whether the choices and decisions we make are creating better opportunities and outcomes for students.
Building What Comes Next
Authorizing for possibility means using accountability with greater purpose. It means creating clear expectations while remaining open to different ways of meeting them. It means protecting autonomy when schools have earned it and responding decisively when students are not being served well. It means reducing barriers where we can and building stronger partnerships where the work is too complex for any one organization to do alone. Most importantly, it means remembering why the work exists.
At the National Charter Schools Institute, we are grateful for the opportunity to work alongside the CSI who has laid the path to what is possible. The strongest partnerships do not erase local knowledge or replace it with an outside answer. They help people surface what they believe, align around what matters, and build the systems needed to turn intention into action.
What made this work meaningful for me is that the best authorizing does more than hold schools accountable. It creates conditions for strong schools to grow, adapt, and better serve students. That is the opportunity in front of us and the possibility worth building for.
Ready to strengthen what’s possible for your schools and students?
