Scaling up Successful Charter Networks

I was glad to take part in a panel organized by Bryan Hassel at the National Charter School Conference in Atlanta last month. We analyzed the key barriers to scaling up charter networks that have been identified by the smart research at Public Impact and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. I was heartened by the similarities between the barriers those groups have identified and the list of worries we keep top of mind at Rocketship as we plan our expansion. We should be careful about over-adopting lessons from other sectors about expansion but so many of the fundamentals are the same for school networks looking to scale. Growing anything to scale at high quality requires a strong model that makes financial sense and can be replicated, a constant pipeline of outstanding leaders (disproportionately groomed from within), and an organizational, mission-driven culture. In addition, external factors need to be managed and influenced carefully in order to create the conditions for high quality growth. All of this is tremendously hard work to be sure but I’m heartened that we are charging down roads that have been paved by other sectors. We must retain these lessons and build on them so that we are enforcing known discipline to a sector that is just getting its sea legs on how to define its own pathways to high quality growth. If every successful charter network grew by 20% per year (which is not as aggressive as growth rates seen in other sectors) we would have 4,000 outstanding schools in the US serving 2 million low income students…a single charter network growing at 40% per year could reach 1 million kids by 2025...that’s impact worth planning for!

Two interesting papers on the topic...

Going Exponential

CRPE/Mathematica study