So You Want to Bring a Charter Network to Town?

This essay continues a conversation I began in an earlier Note and in my first essay, “Why Do Charter School Networks Look So Different?”. I’d love to keep this broader conversation going. Please add your perspective in the comments here on Substack. It also prompted a spirited discussion on Facebook, including thoughtful comments from Robert Pondiscio and Jill Shahen of Empire Charter Consultants. If you’d like to join the Facebook discussion, send me a friend request and mention this essay. I’m happy to add you to my Education Peeps group if we know—or have a good reason to know—each other. If the Facebook group isn’t the right fit, I’m also happy to connect on LinkedIn if we travel in the same circles. There are also links to other social platform crossposts at the bottom of this page.

Imagine you’re serving on the governing board of a proposed charter school. An established network has expressed interest in opening a school in your community. Its existing schools have impressive academic results, its leaders have experience, and its educational model appears to offer exactly the opportunities local families have been seeking. Perhaps it has secured federal expansion funding or attracted the support of a prominent local foundation.

This is exciting. It may represent the opportunity your community has been waiting for. So what should you ask next?

I'm not talking about the familiar questions concerning curriculum, finances, facilities, or compliance with charter school law. Those are important, of course, and any competent authorizer will expect thoughtful answers. I'm talking about the harder questions that may not have straightforward answers: What actually made the network's existing schools successful? Which of those conditions can be reproduced here? What does the organization understand about your community, and what is it merely assuming? How will the local board exercise meaningful authority while giving the operator sufficient freedom to implement its model? And what happens when the parties disagree?

I’ve spent much of my professional life working on different sides of these relationships, including supporting efforts to attract successful charter school operators to Nevada. I remain convinced that communities should be able to benefit from excellent educational models developed elsewhere. But experience has also convinced me that a network’s success in one place, however impressive, is the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. In a recent note, I explored some of these questions through a conversation about school choice and whose knowledge counts. This essay takes up one part of that larger conversation: what it means to bring a charter network into a new community. The first essay in this series asked why charter networks look so different.

Who invited whom?

The scenario I've described assumes that a local board already exists and is looking for an operator. In practice, charter school replication can begin in several very different ways.

Sometimes a community organizes around a particular educational vision and seeks an established organization capable of delivering it. Sometimes a successful network identifies a promising expansion market, recruits a founding leader, and helps assemble a local governing board. Sometimes an aspiring school founder emerges from an organization such as the former Building Excellent Schools fellowship, carrying an educational model informed by successful schools elsewhere. And sometimes a foundation, intermediary organization, or politically influential civic leader brings the parties together, often with the promise of financial or organizational support.

These approaches can all produce excellent schools, and none is inherently more legitimate than the others. But the circumstances under which a partnership forms can shape its assumptions about authority, responsibility, and whose knowledge matters.

Kansas City offers an interesting example of a community-led approach. In 2013, the Midtown Community School Initiative sought proposals for an intentionally diverse public school, ultimately selecting Citizens of the World Charter Schools as its partner. The school opened in 2016. Rather than simply beginning with the reputation of a particular operator, the initiative articulated a vision for the kind of educational experience it wanted to create and invited prospective partners to respond.

I find that approach compelling, although not because I believe every community should issue a formal request for proposals. Its greater value is in the discipline of identifying what a community wants before assuming that any particular organization is the answer. Even if the process does not result in recruiting an established network, it can leave local leaders better equipped to understand their options, evaluate potential partners, or build something themselves.

But what if the relationship begins in the opposite direction? What if a national network sends an experienced educator into a new city to recruit families, assemble a board, and establish a school? What if the board is recruited largely because its members admire the network and want to help bring its model to their community?

There is nothing inherently improper about that arrangement. A governing board can enthusiastically embrace an established educational model and still exercise independent judgment. The question is whether its members understand the difference between supporting the organization that recruited them and governing the school for which they will ultimately be responsible.

That distinction matters because charter autonomy belongs to the charter holder's governing board. The board may delegate extensive operational authority to a management organization, and in many cases doing so makes excellent sense. But delegation does not eliminate the board's responsibility to understand what has been delegated, evaluate performance, and exercise oversight. A local governing board cannot simply function as an advisory committee to a national organization, regardless of how successful that organization has been elsewhere.

A prescription for success?

One temptation in educational improvement is to approach the challenge as though it were a medical problem with a clear diagnosis and an established treatment. Identify a struggling school or community, find an educational model that has worked elsewhere, and administer the intervention as directed.

Anyone who has watched a pharmaceutical commercial knows the familiar instruction to use a medication only as directed. In medicine, that instruction serves an important purpose. But schooling is an extraordinarily complicated social undertaking, and the challenges facing children and communities rarely lend themselves to a single diagnosis or a universally effective prescription.

A successful charter network may have developed a particularly effective combination of curriculum, instructional practices, school culture, staffing arrangements, and leadership systems in its original community. That is an achievement worth studying and, where appropriate, reproducing. But moving into another community may require changing the dosage, frequency, or combination of interventions. Some practices may transfer remarkably well. Others may depend on conditions that do not exist in the new setting.

The difficulty is that we often have better evidence that a particular combination of practices worked than we have about precisely which elements were indispensable to its success. Was the extended school day essential, or did it work primarily because of how the additional time was used? Was the approach to student behavior successful because of the written expectations, or because families had developed extraordinary trust in the educators enforcing them? Did a particular staffing model succeed because of the model itself, or because the original school had access to an unusually deep pool of talented teachers?

These are not arguments against replicating successful practices. They are arguments for understanding them well enough to distinguish between what must remain consistent and what can reasonably change. In a recent conversation, my longtime charter school colleague Jill Shahen described a network that preserves consistency in its core instructional practices while giving individual principals discretion over supplemental materials and supports. I found the distinction useful: fidelity to an educational model need not mean treating every school or community as interchangeable.

The medical analogy has another useful dimension. Even an effective treatment may fail if a patient does not understand it, cannot follow the regimen, or lacks sufficient trust in the provider to continue. Clinicians call this treatment adherence, and the relationship between provider and patient can be an important part of it.

Something similar happens in schools. A network can reproduce its curriculum, classroom routines, and behavioral expectations with remarkable fidelity, but the results may depend on relationships that cannot be reproduced through an operating manual. Do families understand and trust the school's approach? Do students believe their teachers care about them? Can families realistically meet the expectations the school places upon them? When difficulties arise, does the school listen?

A parent who trusts a principal may be willing to work through an ordinary mistake or a difficult disagreement. The same mistake, made by an unfamiliar institution that has not yet earned that trust, may produce a very different response. This does not mean families should simply comply with whatever educators prescribe. Their concerns may reveal weaknesses in the school's assumptions or practices. Unlike a patient taking a medication, families and students are active participants in the educational relationship, and their knowledge and experiences can help improve the approach itself.

That is why a successful school model cannot be understood entirely in terms of what teachers and administrators do. Its effectiveness may also depend on the relationships that allow children, families, and educators to make the model work together. Deep local knowledge and durable relationships should begin during planning and continue through the application and opening process. Still, local engagement is not a guarantee of success. Organizations and approaches associated with Building Excellent Schools, KIPP, and Rocketship have each tried, in different ways, to build or adapt schools in local contexts, with results that have varied across places and over time. The point is not to treat any one example as a verdict, but to ask what the organization learned, what it changed, and whether the community had real influence.

The questions worth spending months answering

This brings us to the conversations that should take place between a prospective governing board and an established operator. Some can be answered with data and documentation. Others require judgment, investigation, and a willingness to challenge assumptions that both parties may initially consider obvious.

A board should want to understand what made the operator's existing schools successful, including the circumstances in which they were less successful. How has the model performed when implemented by leaders other than its founders? What happened when the organization expanded into unfamiliar communities? Which elements of the model have been adapted successfully, and which changes produced disappointing results?

I would be particularly interested in what the operator has learned from its failures. An organization capable of explaining its disappointments thoughtfully may be a more promising partner than one that offers an immaculate narrative of uninterrupted success.

The board should also ask what the operator actually knows about the community it proposes to serve. Has it examined local enrollment patterns, transportation, facilities, staffing, family expectations, and the experiences of existing schools? Has it spoken with prospective families in ways that invite genuine disagreement, rather than simply collecting endorsements? What assumptions is it making that might turn out to be wrong, and what evidence would cause it to reconsider those assumptions?

The operator should be asking equally demanding questions of the board. Does the board understand the educational model it wants to bring into the community? Will it support the model's essential features when those features become controversial? Can its members distinguish between governance and management? What local relationships and capabilities can they contribute, and what assumptions are they making about the families they hope to serve?

A responsible operator should not be expected to surrender its educational judgment whenever a local partner proposes an adaptation. Nor should a local board be expected to accept every practice simply because the operator describes it as essential to model fidelity. Both parties should be prepared to explain why they believe particular elements matter and what evidence supports their positions.

In my experience, hubris and intellectual laziness are distributed in roughly equal measure on both sides of these relationships. An established operator can arrive convinced that its success elsewhere has already answered the important questions. Local leaders can be equally convinced that their familiarity with a community gives them an understanding outsiders cannot possibly possess. And sometimes both sides simply prefer the convenient answer: the network has a model that works, the community needs better schools, and the funding is available. What else is there to discuss?

Quite a lot, actually. The operator may understand instruction and organizational systems far better than its prospective local partners. The board may understand families, neighborhood relationships, and political realities far better than the operator. Neither kind of knowledge is complete, and neither should be immune from examination. The objective is not to determine which party gets to be right, but to establish a relationship in which both parties are expected to explain their reasoning, acknowledge uncertainty, and change their minds when the evidence warrants it.

These conversations may take months. They may reveal disagreements that neither party anticipated, and they may even persuade the parties not to proceed together. That is not necessarily a failure of the recruitment process. It may be evidence that the process is doing precisely what it should.

Money helps. It can also get in the way.

The availability of expansion funding can make an otherwise impossible opportunity feasible. Federal Charter Schools Program grants, local philanthropy, and other sources of start-up support can provide the resources necessary to recruit leaders, secure facilities, develop systems, and open a school before enrollment revenue becomes available.

But the existence of funding is not evidence that a particular educational model is appropriate for a particular community.

A foundation may have spent years developing a strategy for attracting proven charter operators. Its staff may have deep expertise and a genuine commitment to expanding educational opportunity. Those are meaningful assets. Yet a funder's preferred theory of change can become an assumption that nobody is particularly eager to challenge, especially when the funder is paying for much of the work.

Funding timelines can create pressure to open before relationships, facilities, or leadership capacity are fully developed. Grant requirements can reward fidelity to an established design even when thoughtful adaptation might be warranted. And the understandable desire to demonstrate that an investment was wise can make it harder to acknowledge that a particular partnership needs to change.

I supported efforts to recruit successful charter operators to Nevada, including the development of Opportunity 180. I believed then, and continue to believe, that children should benefit from excellent schools regardless of where those schools originated. But the experience reinforced how difficult it can be to reproduce the conditions that supported success in another market. Securing an operator's interest, assembling resources, and creating an expansion plan are substantial achievements. They do not eliminate the work of building a school that can succeed locally.

At their best, funders can help make that work possible. They can support community engagement, independent board development, facilities expertise, and the time required for an operator to understand a new market. They can help create the conditions for thoughtful decision-making rather than simply subsidizing the execution of decisions already made.

At their worst, funders can discourage precisely the kinds of questions that responsible partners ought to be asking. Money can create the space for serious thinking, but it can also create powerful incentives to stop thinking.

What are we building, and who will govern it?

A governing board considering a network partnership should understand not only the educational model but also the organization it is agreeing to create.

What services will the network provide? How will those services be priced and evaluated? Which decisions will be made locally, and which will be made elsewhere? What information will the board receive, and how will it determine whether the organization is fulfilling its commitments? What happens if the board and operator disagree about an important educational or operational decision?

These are not merely questions for lawyers drafting a management agreement. They go to the heart of whether the board can fulfill its responsibilities and whether the operator has the authority it needs to deliver the promised educational experience. Expansion also changes what the operator is. When a network supports a school governed by a separate charter-holding entity, it is no longer simply extending one school; it is providing services to another public entity. That shift brings different governance, financial, legal, and accountability relationships. The board must understand what it is buying, how shared staff and costs are allocated, who controls key decisions and records, how conflicts are handled, and what happens if the relationship ends. The operator, in turn, must be prepared to serve a board that retains independent duties and authority.

The board also needs to consider its own capacity. A group of thoughtful, committed community members may bring valuable knowledge and relationships while having relatively little experience with school finance, organizational governance, or evaluating educational performance. That is not a reason to dismiss their contribution. It is a reason to invest in developing their ability to govern effectively.

Kansas City's experience offers a useful illustration of how these relationships can evolve. After operating for a decade as Citizens of the World Kansas City, the school transferred sponsorship to Kansas City Public Schools and became Midtown Community School in 2026.

The decision should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that the original partnership was a mistake, any more than continued affiliation would necessarily demonstrate its success. The more interesting question is whether the national relationship helped establish educational and organizational capabilities that the local institution could sustain, and whether the services and benefits of affiliation continued to justify their costs.

A partnership that makes excellent sense when a school is founded may need to evolve as the school develops. In other cases, continuing network membership may provide indispensable support. A responsible board should be capable of evaluating those choices without assuming that preserving a particular organizational relationship is itself the school's purpose. The same questions apply when an operator opens a second campus under its own umbrella: new leadership demands, shared systems, and diverted attention may affect the first school as well. Expansion plans should identify how the operator will protect the quality and capacity of existing campuses while building the new one.

What should an authorizer expect?

These questions are also relevant to the public body responsible for deciding whether the proposed school should receive a charter.

A sophisticated authorizer should value an operator's demonstrated record of success. Indeed, an established organization's experience may provide considerably stronger evidence of its ability to deliver on its promises than an untested applicant can offer. But success elsewhere does not relieve an applicant of the responsibility to demonstrate readiness to operate in the community where it seeks authorization.

An application should make clear what the proposed school intends to accomplish, how its educational model is expected to produce those results, which conditions are necessary for implementation, and how the applicant has investigated whether those conditions can be established locally. Evidence for replication deserves the same care. Growth, progress toward proficiency, proficiency itself, and other state measures answer different questions; accountability systems also vary enough that a score in one state may not mean the same thing in another. No single measure should settle the question. Boards, local supporters, and funders may reasonably ask whether the evidence shows meaningful benefits for the children served; operators and authorizers should also examine who is included, who leaves, and what the results conceal.

The authorizer should also be able to determine whether the governing board understands the model and has the capacity to oversee its implementation. That does not require prescribing a particular governance architecture or insisting that every board perform operational functions that are better delegated to experienced professionals. It requires evidence that the board understands its responsibilities and can exercise meaningful judgment.

Wherever possible, student outcomes should be followed over time, including when students move between campuses, so that expansion does not make their progress disappear into separate school-level snapshots. This is especially important across state lines, where data definitions, reporting rules, and access to underlying student-level information can differ. Public summaries are useful, but decision-makers also need enough transparent, privacy-protective evidence to understand student mobility and evaluate the claims being made.

There is an important distinction between an application that describes a proven model in extraordinary detail and one that demonstrates a serious understanding of how that model will work in a new setting. The former may be polished and persuasive. The latter may acknowledge uncertainties, identify risks, and explain how the applicant intends to address them.

I would often find the second more informative.

An authorizer cannot eliminate the uncertainty inherent in opening a new school, and it should not attempt to dictate every detail of how a board and operator organize their relationship. But it should expect evidence that the parties have confronted the important questions rather than assuming that the operator's reputation resolves them.

The months spent developing an application, recruiting a board, negotiating an agreement, and engaging families can provide valuable evidence about the proposed partnership itself. Do the parties listen to one another? Can they explain their decisions? Are they capable of resolving disagreements without turning every dispute into a contest over institutional authority?

Those qualities matter because the challenges will become considerably more consequential once children are enrolled.

The authorizer should not have to discover, after approving a supposedly proven model that subsequently struggles, that its success depended on staffing, relationships, financial resources, or community conditions nobody had seriously examined beforehand.

Of course, authorizers themselves are not immune from hubris or intellectual laziness. Familiarity with an operator, enthusiasm for a particular model, or a desire to demonstrate progress can distort their judgment just as readily as it can distort the judgment of boards, networks, and funders. Public accountability requires the same willingness to question assumptions that authorizers should expect from applicants.

The promise behind the partnership

There is a larger political and moral commitment underlying these conversations.

For more than a century, Americans have been expanding an extraordinary promise: that public education should be available to every child, regardless of family income, disability, background, or the circumstances into which that child was born. We have never fully delivered on that promise. At various points in our history, we have excluded children, segregated them, underestimated their abilities, and offered dramatically different opportunities depending on where they lived and who their parents were.

Nor does fulfilling the promise necessarily mean providing every child with an identical educational experience. Other countries have developed sophisticated approaches to technical and vocational education from which we have much to learn. But there is something powerful about refusing to determine prematurely, or on the basis of a child's circumstances, what that child may become.

Ron Edmonds, one of the intellectual founders of the effective schools movement, famously argued that we could successfully teach all children whenever we genuinely chose to make their education our concern. His formulation was not simply a claim about instructional technique. It was a political and moral challenge to the idea that some children's educational outcomes were effectively beyond our responsibility.

Charter schooling, at its best, is one attempt to meet that challenge. It offers the possibility of developing different educational approaches within a public system committed to serving children, including those whom existing institutions have too often failed to serve well. That is an enormous undertaking, and it remains an unfulfilled mandate.

Which brings us back to the relationship between a community and a prospective charter school operator.

Perhaps the greatest danger in these partnerships is that everyone becomes so invested in being right that they lose sight of what it means to do right. The network wants to demonstrate that its model works. The local board wants to vindicate its vision for the community. The foundation wants its investment to succeed. The authorizer wants to believe it made a sound decision.

All of those interests are understandable, and none is inherently illegitimate. But none is the reason the school exists.

The school exists because children deserve an excellent education, families deserve institutions worthy of their trust, and the opportunities available to young people can shape the course of their lives. Sometimes doing right will mean defending an effective educational practice when it is unpopular. Sometimes it will mean adapting a practice that worked elsewhere but is not serving children well here. Sometimes it will mean acknowledging that a proposed partnership is not ready, or that an existing one needs to change.

And sometimes it will mean admitting that someone else at the table understood something important that you did not.

We can be uncompromising about the proposition that every child deserves an excellent education without pretending that we know precisely how to deliver it in every community. Indeed, that commitment should make us more curious, more demanding of evidence, and more willing to learn from one another.

The question isn't whose model prevails, whose authority wins, or whose investment is vindicated. It's whether the people responsible for the school are willing to put aside the need to be right in order to do what is right for these children, in this community, and for the futures none of us should presume to determine for them.

Or, if you’d rather join in elsewhere, you can find me on X, Threads, Instagram, Bluesky, or Mastodon. 😀

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