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Charter Schools Round 2

Teacher Network

Assignment: You have about 60 minutes for this activity. As a small team, using the markers and white walls provided in your break out area, please prepare a ‘model’ that can be shared with the other teams. Your model should articulate your team’s solution for Charter Schools in California working optimally and specifically addressing teacher network inefficiencies.

Use the following questions to stimulate your thinking:

What are the top 1 to 3 inefficiencies that Charter Schools face relative toteacher network?
What is a possible solution for optimizing teacher network efficiency throughout the entire system?
How should the ideal process work? What would it look like (draw a flow diagram that articulates the ideal process that addresses teacher network efficiencies)?
What are the top 3 to 5 actions that need to be taken for to make a teacher network efficient for all Charter Schools throughout California?

Use words and images to develop your model and action steps.

Report Out: Teachers have little time to network and do continuing education. In the public schools you only get 2 or 3 days per year to get continuing education. There is no ability to teach best practices and everything is lost in the day to day activities.

We talked about the inefficiencies. There is a lack of a common forum for interaction between teachers. There is no forum for teachers to get together to talk about their jobs. Large public schools can pull people out of the classroom but charter schools don’t have the redundancy in place to do that.

They have a culture of competing initiatives. There are lots of good ideas floating around and there is no culture of picking the best one and running with it. There is no mechanism to pick the best one and move forward with it.

Solutions
Our solution is to create a forum for teachers to teach and be taught – by one another. In order for this to work there needs to be extra pay linked to participating in these forums. Teachers should be paid and have that linked to participating – like in continuing education models that exist in other industries. In addition to the pay for teachers there will be extra costs to participate in this – someone will have to prepare forum, the school will have to fill in and there is transportation costs.

There are a lot of charter schools so there has to be some linking up either regionally or through CCSA – to share costs of producing curriculum that makes sense to schools (many schools have unique programs but you also want some standardization that they can benefit from).

This forum has to be part of their job. You have to go. It’s easy to find ways to not do it so it has to be part of their career path.

You need time at the conclusion of this training to develop an action plan for implementing what they learn so that distractions from the workplace get in the way of supporting them to use new knowledge.

What are they going to do tomorrow? CCSA will survey the charter schools about a training curriculum – what teachers would want to talk about that would increase their job satisfaction and knowledge? Define what the consumers want to consume.

Then you would have to develop a feasibility plan. What’s the cost to do this? There has to be a feasibility plan to do something like this. If the financial requirements are feasible there will then be a financial plan to do this.

Then you have to think about things like: How much do you charge schools? Who is going to do the teaching? The result is that every charter school will have people that can attend this.

Comment – teacher collaboration is such a core part of the school community (teachers, parents, students, etc. are a learning community). The network needs to be happening at the school level or at least the local level. At some point you can do this across different schools but you have to have something locally.

People are busy 100% of the time. Unless you pull people out of the office they just won’t do something like this. We should also consider how different forums will work for different groups. Maybe the internet works for some?

Facilities

Use the following questions to stimulate your thinking:

What are the top 1 to 3 inefficiencies that Charter Schools face relative to facilities?
What is a possible solution for optimizing facilities efficiency throughout the entire system?
How should the ideal process work? What would it look like (draw a flow diagram that articulates the ideal process that addresses facilities efficiencies)?
What are the top 3 to 5 actions that need to be taken for to make facilities efficient for all Charter Schools throughout California?

Use words and images to develop your model and action steps.

What we looked at are six solution spaces. At a high level we had an A plan and a B plan and they aren’t mutually exclusive. The A plan is a longer term solution. The first part is to get prop 39 to work for schools and to make it so that schools don’t have to take big mortgages to fund their schools.

You would still have some schools that want to do their own thing.

The next part of plan A is increasing the availability of state and local bond funds. They still have to deal with a lot of stuff that educators don’t do – like real estate development.

In the short term we thing there are three other solutions. One is an equity pool. It’s largely about money and capacity. They have to get money to buy, or build or make tenant improvements. We need an equity pool or a state program that would allow qualified schools to be able to get down payment money.

We are making good progress on making capital available to charter schools but we need to do more.

There is a lack of charter schools facilities development capacity. Things like: Site identificaion, zoning, design, construction, financing and getting money to pay for all this. We need an organization that can do all this. We have one in LA but we can support 2 or 3 more in LA alone. Pacific Charter School Development is the group in LA.

This solution is a regional play.

We need several schools to come together to do this whole thing once instead of doing it separately for each school. We can have one larger campus for multiple schools and have some economies and share things.

An extension of this would be an incubator model – it’s a shared space but it’s temporary.

These are the solutions we would want to look for that we would need regulatory changes for. Some of this is underway. We need lawsuits against districts. We need charter schools to take on their districts. And, we need to work with districts and help them understand what needs to be done.

We need to mobilize voters.

Equity pool – This can be done by a foundation or group of foundations or some high net worth individuals. Maybe we can find high net worth individuals that want a school named after them? Maybe there needs to be a Charter REIT developed?

Maybe there is some state funds to use for a down payment?

The debt arena is moving along with CDFI’s and at some point that could be opened up to the public debt markets.

Matchmaking – you need to replicate PCSD.

What about making the equity pool available to schools that haven’t started yet? Can we make funding available to them? Our thinking on that is unadvisable as there is so much unpredictability.

Do most charter schools own their buildings?

When you say equity pool for high need schools I worry about defining what high need is. Schools that are north of Sacramento do not get any of those funds. What is high need really?

Equity pool – to the extent it’s put together by foundations then their priorities would need to be considered. Finding high net worth individuals is potentially easier to do.

The thing we don’t have our arms around is the Charter Reit or an equity fund. We need these facilities development one stop shopping contractors. We need more of them.

There are plenty of people that can build a school unprofitably. The private markets would take care of it quickly if there is enough money in it.

Every developer can do what Pacific Charter does so the way to replicate them is getting grant money to operate.

Back Office

Use the following questions to stimulate your thinking:

What are the top 1 to 3 inefficiencies that Charter Schools face relative to back office?
What is a possible solution for optimizing back office efficiency throughout the entire system?
How should the ideal process work? What would it look like (draw a flow diagram that articulates the ideal process that addresses back office efficiencies)?
What are the top 3 to 5 actions that need to be taken for to makeback office efficient for all Charter Schools throughout California?

Use words and images to develop your model and action steps.

What is going on here is things are hard to standardize. There is a lack of knowledge of what you don’t know. There is a lack of specialization. In school districts or in companies you have people doing these back office functions but you don’t have that in Charter Schools.

We learned there is a big difference in the cost of services. We are paying really different amounts for services. There are two providers in SoCal and one in NoCal. To put dollars to this so you understand what we’re saying, there is a different of $9000/month between what we are paying. That is big.

Schools like hers are probably subsidizing schools like mine.

A lack of transparency goes through all these spaces. It’s hard to maintain that visual contact. There aren’t systems to access our accounts payable and accounts receivable. There is also a lack of quality. There is a lack of competition and possibly a lack of oversight.

We have no way to evaluate what providers to use and it costs us a lot.

We need a financial diagnostic tool – and we need to help schools engage early on and at regular intervals so they can know what they are doing well and what they need help doing. How do we help schools figure that out? You are running and you need it done so you do it. We don’t have time to shop for better services. It takes too much time and too much effort. We need to spend time hiring teachers.

We don’t know if a coop is the right idea but it’s something. Why do you want to do this yourself if there is someone else doing it and you could do it for less?

Stakeholder control is key. They can determine the transparency and the quality and this coop could compete with some of these companies that are doing it. There might not be a lot of back office providers but the same providers are now servicing 10 times as many schools.

Someone could come up with a set of practices and some tools to evaluate how it’s going.

We hired someone that used to work for Dolly Madison and he’s developed some tools that he would share with you if you like. They have been very helpful for us.

How would you start a coop?

Here’s an example. We just did it. Because of the lack of representation for Charters north of Sacramento we grouped together. We got together last week and there are 8 charter schools that are members and 6 of them showed up to our first meeting. One of the big issues for all of us that we discussed last week was back office. We’re paying more then $500,000 to this one company to do that so there is a huge opportunity here.

There is something wrong with this picture as there is a lot of money going away from kids. It’s almost like a JPA and each of the schools buyin.

If we felt like there was a market that was taking care of these inefficiencies then she wouldn’t need to do her own.

How do we hold these companies accountable so we don’t have to start our own coop to do it? We went back and forth on this. If you don’t want to take it on then we have to figure out how to make these other organizations do it.

We’re also under intense political pressure. Between Sacramento and the Oregon border there is a huge amount of space and there is no one that can represent us besides us. We have to come together as a political and a legal force. We sued the district over prop 39.

Along with the diagnostic tool you might have a consumer reports kind of evaluation on these companies delivering these services. It could be something like the JD Powers rating.

Marketing and Policy

Use the following questions to stimulate your thinking:

What are the top 1 to 3 inefficiencies that Charter Schools face relative tomarketing and policy?
What is a possible solution for optimizing marketing and policy efficiency throughout the entire system?
How should the ideal process work? What would it look like (draw a flow diagram that articulates the ideal process that addresses marketing and policy efficiencies)?
What are the top 3 to 5 actions that need to be taken for to make marketing and policy efficient for all Charter Schools throughout California?

Use words and images to develop your model and action steps.

We started with the landscape. There is no unified voice and there is no unified local reach. Your financials are going to be driven by enrollment and that is a local issue. The unions have a unified voice and that’s a challenge as they are not well incented to support charters.

Your audience is parents, students, funders, legislators, etc. and you have to get rid of all the myths that exist about Charter Schools as well as promoting the value of them. We are wanting to educate parents to know what their options are.

Maybe we should be securing more money per students? $6000 per student isn’t enough. Maybe if you bumped it up just a little that would help?

The fact that districts authorize charters and then they are incented to not get along is something to look at. If there are different organizers there needs to be parity. We also need to separate the authorizers from oversight.

We talked about the idea of getting rid of unions or boards. This is important to think about because it’s fundamentally at the core of the challenges that we’ve talked about – it’s at the heart of all the challenges and you don’t want to ignore it even though it’s probably not going to happen.

Policy and legislation is important. We need organizations like Ed Voice to do what they do and maybe we need more organizations like them. That’s at the state level but at the local level what does that look like? Maybe we need to get messages out about the effective and impactful things circulated so that people are empowered to do something locally.

Hiring the best local teachers is valuable as they are already networked and know the local community and what things are like.

We need information about the ways to talk to the press. You need the local effort coordinated as well as the state effort. Get some charter leaders elected to local office.

Infrastructure – maybe there needs to be a local version of Ed Voice (city or county level ones)? Maybe we need student leaders who go back to other schools to get the message out? Getting students to speak for themselves is great.

Get a local PR firm – maybe a coop PR firm. You could hire this out or you could do a coop model. There is no local reach – let’s craft the message and then spread that message in a meaningful way. Reaching out to families locally is where the leverage is.

There needs to be a plan that has buy-in from charter organizations on how we are going to do that. We thought this could happen in 6 months. If you hire a PR firm it would take a short time.

Maybe you prove the concept and then roll it out over the next year?

You don’t want to be unrealistic but we thought we could determine the message within 6 months.

The people in this room are so focused on other things that we need an organization to do this.

PR – we’ve been trying to get adopted something related to a coop. There are over 580 schools with over 3000 board members and we want every charter to designate one board member to get something out on the radio or in the news. We haven’t figured out how to get schools to do this – we don’t know the right incentives. I don’t think it would take a lot of convincing about the value. Everyone has to create a board. It’s a question making that a priority.