Thanks to everyone who responded publicly and privately to last week’s posts on charter data.
It really helped me clarify my thinking.
Some further thoughts below.
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Scott Pearson made an interesting point about charter growth / closures trends. Scott noted that:
- National new school openings have been fairly consistent over past decade: 400-500 per year.
- National closure rates have also been fairly consistent at 3-4%.
Given this, we get Pearson’s Law: if national new school openings and national closure rates both remain at historical constants, eventually we will hit a year of zero net new schools.
In short, because the closure rate is based on total existing charters, eventually total existing charters will be large enough that a 3-4% closure rate means more schools are closing than opening.
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Smart people at Arnold Foundation said they’d much rather know total of net new high-quality openings than simply net new openings. I agree. See end of post for all I’d want to better understand.
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Others raised the point that perhaps many of us may have been wrong: growing the sector through very high bar authorization (NY, MA, etc.) might end up being an inferior strategy scaling the sector rapidly and then cleaning it up (FAT states: FL, AZ, TX).
For whatever it’s worth, in New Orleans I think we took a middle ground here: we grew the sector with less quality control than MA but more than the FAT states.
All told, the most recent data has moved a few notches over to the FAT strategy.
But I don’t think the FAT strategy should be a law yet. Still much to learn.
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Moving forward, I think we’d be much better off we had the following national data:
- Total new openings
- With new school being defined as the initiation of an expansion that will lead to an increase of enrollment of +300 students over time.
- With data scrubbed by every state charter association contacting each operator to get exact data.
- Maturity: school tagged as start-up, early stage replication (2-4), large CMO.
- Quality: each operator is tagged by some quality measure (CREDO?) so we understand what % of expansions are high-quality replications.
- Source: each school is tagged to a source, if any (Charter School Growth Fund, New Schools Venture, BES, local harbormaster, etc) so where we understand where schools are coming from.
- Geography: Urban, suburban, rural.
- Diversity: whether CMO leader / school leader is person of color.
- Closures
- Cycle: whether closure occurred during renewal or through crisis.
- Age: how many years charter had been in existence.
- Enrollment: how many students school enrolled.
- Authorizer: whether it was district, non-profit, state, or university.
- Quality: how school performed on state tests and / or CREDO (and perhaps attainment as well).