Every charter school CEO and trustee has a role to play in helping the board contribute to meeting your school's academic excellence goals.
Your charter is a contract to increase student achievement.
Having a charter is one of the major strengths of charter school boards, as compared with any kind of a general nonprofit.
Your charter is a contract. It states very clearly the results you must deliver within a certain number of years. When you’re granted that contract, and the freedoms and state funding that come along with it, you promise to increase student achievement.
And, to be clear, that contract is given to the board. It’s not given to the CEO. The board must follow through on its contractual obligation ensure to deliver academic excellence.
As with any committee, your Academic Excellence Committee’s work should be organized around goals and tasks.
One of your committee’s primary goals might be:
Develop a process to educate and train the full board on proper academic oversight by March 1. Submit growth plan to authorizer by March 1 deadline.
And, to ensure you meet that goal, you might assign specific committee members the following tasks:
- CEO and leadership align on key academic indicators of success.
- Chief Academic Officer {CAO} drafts presentation outlining the academic vision of excellence and key indicators of success.
- Committee reviews presentation at its next committee meeting and discuss training/education plan.
- CAO and committee chair reserve time on next month’s board meeting agenda for training.
Here's how your Academic Excellence Committee can set the right goals.
1. Understand what your charter promises to deliver.
You’ve made a promise to deliver academic excellence. And, if you don’t deliver on the promises made in your charter, you don’t get to keep your charter.
The board and CEO need to be crystal clear on the promises you’ve made to the authorizer who granted your charter.
Keep these promises top-of-mind throughout the year. Ask your CEO or their designee to put the key the charter promises into a simplified document for the board.
This should be something laypeople can understand and absorb at a glance. List the top 10 to 15 things that, when you come up for renewal, are going to be looked at. Make sure they’re front and center, for everyone on your governance team to easily see.
For reference, it’s helpful to include in the document the page number where each academic achievement promise is stated in your charter or accountability plan.
Depending on the nature of your programs, there may also be mission-specific elements to include. You might be an Expeditionary Learning Outward-Bound school or a Montessori school, with specific statements in your charter about those foundational elements.
2. Get acquainted with the key drivers of academic excellence.
Academic excellence is the heart of the multi-million dollar public enterprise you’re governing. To govern well, the board will need to invest time in understanding the key drivers of academic success.
The board should be able to rely on the CEO, and potentially the leadership staff, to educate them appropriately. A BoardSavvy CEO will play an active role in educating the full board in this area.
Most trustees are not educators. Certainly, you should have some people on this committee who have a background in education. But they don’t all have to be educators.
To contribute strategically, you do not need to be so steeped in the academics that you could teach in the classroom. You’re not there to pick curriculum or evaluate teachers. You need to understand the key drivers and results of your organization’s academic programs. You’re there to look at goals, and know if they’re overly ambitious or not. And you’re there to monitor.
3. Define your high bar for academic excellence.
Your charter promises are most likely the minimal outcomes needed to keep your charter. But are your charter promises enough? Or are they merely a baseline?
It can make sense to aim for doable results in your charter. Of course, you’re going to achieve the bare minimum; at least meet the terms in your charter. But you want more for your kids than just the basics.
In many states, what’s defined as enough to gain or keep your charter is minimal. In those states, just achieving the terms laid out in your charter wouldn’t really be achieving excellence.
So challenge yourselves. What’s your high bar? What does academic excellence mean for you?
Test scores are important. But what else measures excellence in your organization? What do your graduates take with them into the world, besides the test scores?
Get specific about your vision, translate that into measurable outcomes, and hold yourselves accountable. For instance, perhaps you’re aiming to ensure that all of your scholars will get into competitive four-year colleges. Or that they’ll have meaningful work experiences before they graduate.
4. Create annual academic goals that map to your vision of academic excellence.
First, the CEO or school leader will develop a set of annual academic goals. These goals should be time-bound and measurable. They’ll present them to the Academic Excellence Committee for discussion. Then, the finalized goals and timeline are brought to the full board for approval.
Start with the level of success achieved in the preceding year. Then, determine where you can be by the end of the current or upcoming year.
Keep in mind that some academic goals can certainly be reached in a year, while others might need to be broken out into multi-year plans.
Say you’re a high school, and when your kids enroll, they tend to be way below grade level. They’re looking to you to bring them up to their grade level — and beyond. This might not be a simple one-year goal. You’re going to need a multi-year improvement plan, to get the kids up to grade level. You want to be clear about that with your board.
The CEO and board work together to set the organization’s measurable goals for academic achievement. You examine the data together. And you make data-driven decisions, together.
5. Work in partnership towards achieving your vision for academic excellence.
Let’s be clear. The board does not do this work in a vacuum. The CEO, the Academic Excellence Committee, and the full board, all have roles to play
The board-CEO partnership is central to every aspect of the charter board’s work. But, quite possibly, this is no more vital than in the area of academic excellence.
As you work towards achieving your goals, the CEO needs to feel that the board can and is adding value here. The board needs to complement the work of the CEO, as well as that of the full academic team.
They shouldn’t duplicate the work; they should contribute strategically.
The CEO’s role is to utilize existing data to draft academic achievement goals for the upcoming year. The committee’s role is to review those proposed goals and to ask questions.
The committee is there to make sure the goals are ambitious and achievable — and to utilize data presented by the academic leadership to monitor progress throughout the year.
Again, even if you’re not an educator, you can contribute here. Look at comparable data against other people in your city or state. If they can do it, you can do it.
But if your CEO’s proposing something that nobody’s ever done, if there’s no data to back up that it’s doable, you might want to question the plan. Caution against anything that doesn’t seem doable.
When ready, the CEO and the Academic Excellence Committee will together recommend finalized goals and tasks to the full board for approval.
Ensure that each trustee understands the goals. When the CEO and committee chair co-present to the board, the committee, as non-educators, can be a good translation service of the whole alphabet soup of things like state testing and other nitty gritty elements of academic excellence drivers and data points.
If your board has developed a strong understanding of the academic excellence key drivers, your charter promises, your vision for academic excellence, and your specific goals, you’re well on your way to working in partnership to achieve your vision.
How to monitor your progress towards academic excellence goals.
Look at the data consistently, at the regular board meetings and Academic Excellence Committee meetings.
Throughout the year, the CEO should present the Academic Excellence Committee with data and updates on progress towards goals. Dive deep into the data at those committee meetings. Validate the approaches and the progress being made — or lack thereof.
The committee should review, ask questions, and help the CEO frame what level of detail will be shared with the full board at the next meeting. Bring the headlines to the full board meetings. But don’t go into all the micro details at the full board meetings.
Here's the data your board should see regularly -- and the questions you should ask.
Frame the data around a key set of questions that the board and CEO continually ask themselves. We recommend:
- Are students making progress toward attaining the highest level of academic achievement?
Look at things like ELA gains, math proficiency, graduation rates, or post-secondary engagement.
- Has our organization established a powerful climate and culture in which students can thrive?
The data points that can tell you a lot here are attendance, on-time arrival, parent satisfaction, or even student suspensions.
- Does our organization recruit, develop and retain exceptional staff?
Look at teacher retention, teacher satisfaction, teacher turnover. If you have an HR committee, the human capital piece might live there. But, if your board is too lean for that, it can be part of the Academic Excellence Committee’s focus.
Decide the questions that are right for your committee. And, for each question, ask yourselves: how do you know? What data can you look at? What evidence does your CEO have?
Be careful to come up with just a few KPIs or key performance indicators. Focus on the most important things.
We’ve seen some boards ask for more and more and more data. But the board can only absorb so much. And you only want so much of the academic leadership’s time invested in gathering and reporting data to the board.
So, be careful to come up with a few KPIs or key performance indicators. Focus on the most important things.
Reach back to your charter promises. Are you, at a minimum, measuring the things that are going to help you keep and expand your charter?
Make sure you’re using those metrics first. And layer other things on.
Look at the key things that you can see in your BoardOnTrack dashboards. We came to those because we’ve worked with hundreds of charter school boards to identify what works. So, if we think they’re pretty important, it’s not only because we know what we’re talking about. It’s because your peers told us.
And remember, the committee might look at deeper details than the board as a whole.
Just like how the Finance Committee is probably looking at a lot of detail. But at a board level, you’re looking at cash on hand and basic things like that.
Advice to BoardSavvy CEOs on strategically reporting progress towards your academic excellence goals.
Provide context for benchmark data.
The board needs data. But, just telling them, “Our school was at x% and now we’re at y%” on this key metric, gives them data but no context for the data.
Show them how you rate, compared to all the other charters in your city or your state. Show them how your gains are similar to the gains others have been able to make — and why you think they’re credible.
Giving your board comparison data will help a lot in the conversations. It’ll prepare them to hear and understand the high-level strategies that you think are going to help you move the needle.
Be clear about what data will be available, and at what intervals.
Data points like attendance might be reviewed on a monthly basis, to spot trends. While some things you might only have a few times a year like you’re taking the NWEA map.
You’ll want to get clear with the committee, and the board as a whole, when you’ll have what data and when you’ll be able to report out to them.
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