We can go in any order, but we'll start with the vision groups.

Team 1: Vision

Assignment:

We were thinking about where are we now and where we want to go by 2011.

We agreed on the vision: Access to high quality education for all.

Five Areas for Improvement
Then we looked at the inefficiencies and organized them by order of importance: 1) hostile district /charter school relations 2) limited access to facilities 3) clear funding levels and parity 4) current leaders operational skill gaps 5) shared capacity.

How to get there? We have not succeeded at telling the non-charter community what charter schools are. Maybe it's through trade associations or by demonstrating success. We have to counter the misinformation from non-charter friendly people.

The facilities questions was big. Right now, we wrote that it would take a miracle to solve this issue. The stock of schools (red) . These are linked. It's the fox guarding the chicken house. We would benefit from independent authorizers: state, county, etc.

By 2011 all charter schools provide seats for their kids and receive facilities bond money. There are different LEA options. Parity is key. We want K-12 to look like higher education - essentially it should look like the California state university system. All the schools would compete for funding by providing better quality education. We talked about having three different kinds of leadership skills: instructional, operational, and community.

Legislation came up again. We feel that if we could more efficiently access and manage resources then we could make a better argument for getting more resources.

Could you s hare a little bit about the business model please?

Shared Capacity
The concept would be to reduce operational cost. To do this we would focus on shared access to services; pooling insurance; and shared access to technology and expertise. That led to the notion of shared staff - should every CMO have business managers? Schools should focus on teaching and learning and not back-office. Special education and risk management could be shared too.

We didn't have good data to understand the economies of scale. Should there be one charter school payroll system? There are economy breaks to learn from the other industries.

The free market forces would show us what was working and not working. But facilities are big forces. It's hard to innovate around chartering because it's so legislative driven. Between '06 and '11 we will have a lot of different options to examine and pursue.

The reason why those procurement issues aren't always the focus when it comes to saving cost is because purchasing is maybe %10 of a budget, there are bigger problems than pooled procurement.

But I don't think they're not major issues, we just need to think through it more.

Team 2: Vision

Assignment:

We had a diverse team. We had people from office supply, grocery and production. So no one knew a lot about charter schools so we had to make stuff up.

We started with a utopian model: everyone is entitled to an excellent education. All of these entities are going to have to join together in the cooperative entity. The facility sharing and the back-office function occur through some sort of sharing.

We talked a lot about market share and growth. Better information has to be given to parents. The parents will go to the best place they have access to information to.

We talked about performance metrics being key. How will we know when there's success? We listed a few things: peer-to-peer review; quality testing and guidelines;, student retention; teacher retention; student teacher ratios ; graduation rates; teacher compensation/benefits; environmental impact; financial stability; capacity; and governance.

Team 3: Business Model

Assignment:

It's nice to be exposed to these different business models. We looked at what are the gaps for charter schools and what do they need to be more successful. In our model it could be a co-op or non-profit or something else. The state and local school link has to be strong. Our model is segmented into local branches.

State Focus
The state focus should be: policy, purchasing, quality assurance rating system; system development (applications, etc); report standardization; information clearing house; intranet; best practices (statewide online, local convening); systems for financial management.

Local Focus
The local chapter focus should be: needs assessment; facilities (development/maintenance); student recruitment; marketing; strategic planning (startup assistance, business planning); staff training; HR recruitment (attraction/retention); delivery/support for financial management.

The challenge was to maintain uniqueness. If you look at this model you will notice it looks a lot like the public school model. The functionality of the local branch is really important. Another key question is how much are we really spending? We have to know what charter schools really spend.

Questions
One of the things we talked about is that there are benefits to public schools. But there's a downside too. How can we focus on the good?

Can't current sources provide for some of those things?

They can. But a lot of districts aren't really supportive of charter schools.

There's two issues: most of the current districts aren't good at doing this. Some districts are better than others. But it's a fundamental issues of incentives - fundamentally the incentive are not aligned.

Isn't the goal between charter schools and public schools identical? To give the best quality education to students. So in theory if you're not happy with your police department you shouldn't be able to start your own. In our model, there's no intrinsic interest to charter schools existence. That's a dilemma. Ultimately, in the best world there'd be a withering away of charter schools or public schools and the best idea would arise.

As a parent, why should my child be relegated to the income of the neighborhood I live in? Charter schools can provide a choice for parents in lo- income neighborhoods. The benefit is really about school choice.

I don't take for granted that charter schools and public schools have the same goals. There are powerful adult forces involved in public schools. Things like, labor unions, and teacher unions whose goal is to support the interests of their members. They want to keep their jobs and preserve the size of their districts.

I don't assume that. I know some charter schools who are interested in the money primarily. It's not all altruistic on either side. I'm trying to explain that in our model collaboration is our goal.

In order to get that you do have to change the underlying incentive structure.

Isn't the ultimate goal to get back good schools - innovative neat little schools for every child.

Traditional district schools aren't doing these things well either - is that implied?

Well, they're not educating kids well. Some are doing it well, but at a price. It's union labor and it's expensive.

Santa Clara runs the best job classified site online.

Anything else?

Team 4: Business Model

Assignment:

What do we know about good charter schools. That's where these houses come from. They represent big skill sets and pieces of knowledge.

Facilities is where we started. It's made up of community development; brokers; compliance; finance; and design.

Back-Office: school finance; cash flow - how does a school operate if you're not given funds until February or March? So we talked a lot about different funding programs. reporting; HR/ benefits; training, internal understanding of what the house is about.

Student Achievement: shared best practices; teacher recruitment and development (hiring quality teachers); accountability and measurement - both standardized and authentic (it's not just about meeting state standards); accreditation; instructional leadership (resides with principal or CEO).

Board Governance: recruiting a high-quality board members to be responsible for fund raising and community development; help with local politics; legal compliance; and marketing

Quality Assurance: self-regulate; outside metrics; strategic planning. Self regulation and outside metrics help development strategic plans.

Sate and Federal Politics: equal funding; vouchers; lobbying; marketing and awareness.

Self-Audit. How do we decide how to spend our time and resources? It's crazy to think some charter schools operator be good at all these. So we create a needs assessment for schools. The lights represent this. The self-audit could serve as the carrot for potential charter operators. And a stick for schools that are currently in operation.

The other idea is that not just schools do board government well. So when you think of economies of scale you could go to other business sectors for help.

Did you state that these services could be delivered by a single organization?

I think it could be or the association could say there are experts out there in the field and it could serve as a clearing house to them.

I have a question for you all. If we were going to pick something from the four things we talked about that offer the highest leverage - what would they be? What provides the most value? Where do we get economies of scale?

Absent of what's in the market today or whatever is available?

Things that are the furthest away from student achievement would make the best choice. back-office and something around facilities.

How about policy and lobbying? It seems to be somewhat of a common theme. Legislation and policy are two issues to examine.

I'm struggling with the fact that charter schools don't know what they don't know. Until we have a tool for where we need assistance I feel it falls on deaf ears. For me the self-audit is really the heart of what's going on.

In charter schools there is a group out of England that looks at our schools. They have low penetration though.

So you may be thinking about some sort of development of a self-audit tool and/or process?

Charter teachers are fairly isolated.

What do you mean by back office?

Payroll, accounts payable & receivable, and compliance. By compliance I mean data reporting. Access to cash flow and financial management are also involved

Are these things big enough to break into groups on?

Maybe something on better information for the public. It's hard to drive awareness when parents think charter schools aren't public schools and that they're private schools.

So I will add marketing and branding.

I want to ask for two things. Where is there a gap? And, the bigger picture - if you could change certain environmental variables where would it make a marked difference? It would be helpful to hear those voices.

I want to put you into small groups and to focus on four of these items.

The four: facilities; legislation/policy/marketing/branding; teacher network; and back office.

We want four people in each group and we want diversity.