How Much Feedback Is Too Much? A Tension in Charter Authorizing.

N.B. This post is derived from a LinkedIn post I wrote on July 20, 2026, and from the conversation it generated there and offline, particularly an exchange with Marie Steffensen that pushed my thinking further than the original post did. I’m expanding on both here.

One tension in charter authorizing that I keep coming back to:

When a school is struggling, the authorizer should not become the operator. The school’s board and leadership must own the response.

But that does not mean accepting a weak or implausible corrective action plan.

There is a clear difference between saying, “We are requiring you to adopt this specific curriculum, staffing model, vendor, or enrollment strategy,” and saying, “Your proposed plan does not appear legally sound, financially viable, or adequate to the scope of the problem.”

That distinction matters. When authorizers prescribe operational solutions, accountability blurs. If the approach fails, it becomes unclear whose strategy it was. But the opposite mistake is just as risky. Authorizers cannot treat any school-submitted plan as acceptable simply because the operator owns the work.

What I think we talk about less is how this tension shows up earlier in the lifecycle.

Imagine a school in year two that receives a formal notice that its academics are weak, or that it has another serious issue. The intervention ladder is working as intended. The school responds with an improvement plan. Now the authorizer has to decide how to engage.

In my view, this is a harder and more important question than the late-stage scenario where a school is up for renewal and suddenly promises transformation. Part of what makes it harder is how little clean evidence exists at this point. Year-one state accountability results often don’t land until well into year two, and there’s frequently real daylight between what a school’s internal data shows and how the state’s accountability formula actually scores it.

By the time a renewal decision has to be made, the actual number of verified data points an authorizer has to work with is often smaller than it looks from the outside.

At this earlier stage, the authorizer is not deciding whether to close the school. The question is how to respond to a proposed remedy:

Do you treat the plan as sufficient and say, “Thank you, proceed, and we will monitor results”? Do you make a judgment that the plan is fundamentally flawed and say, “This is not credible, and you need to revise it”? Or do you try to walk a line between those positions, offering substantive feedback without crossing into prescribing the solution?

This is where the boundary gets blurry. If you push too far, you risk effectively making the decision for the school and owning the outcome. If you stay too hands-off, you risk allowing a weak plan to proceed under the banner of operator autonomy.

So here is the question I keep wrestling with: what should authorizers look for when deciding whether a school’s proposed plan is actually credible, especially in earlier-stage interventions where the stakes are high but closure is not yet on the table? I am especially interested in cases involving declining enrollment, weak demand, financial stress, or operational instability.

One partial answer

The most persuasive evidence of capacity to execute a plan is having done it before. For a struggling school, that evidence tends to be scarce almost by definition, which means authorizers are often left judging capacity indirectly, through personnel, leadership, and the confidence or lack of it that staff and boards express about who is running the school.

That’s a harder judgment to make cleanly than it looks, because it carries a real cost either way. A vote of no confidence in a school leader, whether explicit or implicit, is damaging on its own, even if that leader could actually have turned things around. It can destabilize the team and trigger an executive search, disruptions that happen regardless of whether the underlying judgment was right. Being mostly right that a leader isn’t up to the task doesn’t undo that disruption.

That’s really the tension underneath all of this: how much feedback is too much feedback. Bless a shaky plan, and if it fails, some of that is on you. Push back hard, and if what comes back next is worse, that’s on you too. There’s no version of this where the authorizer isn’t exposed. The best an authorizer can probably do is be honest about which risk they’re choosing to take on, rather than pretending there’s a version of this that carries no risk at all.