The authors don’t beat around the bush: Bad charters may exist, but so do excellent ones—and the latter should be supported and scaled to serve exponentially more students. If the top 10 percent of charter schools expanded at a rate similar to other growing industries, we learn from this PPI study, they could reach all children in poverty by 2025. To do so, the authors offer recommendations on how to overcome current practical, political, and environmental barriers to growth, borrowing strategies from businesses and organizations like Apple, Habitat for Humanity, and Starbucks. First, they advise that the top charter providers rid themselves of their “pervasive fear of growth”; leaders should commit not just to excellence, but to excellence for increasing numbers of students. Other suggestions include: negotiating performance-based funding in contracts; ramping up efforts to import talent from other industries and cultivate it in the education sector; extending the reach of the best teachers through technology and innovation; providing incentives and rewards for leaders who achieve successful growth; and aligning with other similar organizations to share ideas and resources. While some may balk at the stark comparison between the education sector and other (largely for-profit) industries, this brief may prove to be the shot-in-the-arm that the charter sector needs to cure it of its complacency and timidity. The report serves less as a blueprint for development and more as a call to arms for top charter providers, and as the title implies, the possibilities are exponential.
Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel, and Joe Ableidinger, “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best” (Washington, D.C.: Progressive Policy Institute, 2011).
