Strategic Plan: 2007-2009

Introduction

Sixteen years young, the public charter school movement is now serving 1.2 million students across the nation, improving student achievement and expanding educational opportunities particularly for minority and disadvantaged students who are often ill-served by traditional school systems. Charter schools are achieving these successes despite political, financial, and institutional challenges. State and federal policies and politics hinder charter school development, the support infrastructure for charter schools is weak, and best practices spread too slowly. Moreover, charter authorizers are often indifferent or hostile, charter schools are widely misunderstood by policymakers and the public, and the persistence of low-performing charters undercuts the case for scale. These barriers prevent charter schools from serving many more students and families in need of quality educational options. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (the Alliance) has developed a three-year Strategic Plan to guide its role in tackling these constraints.

The Alliance is the national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement. Established in 2005, the Alliance aims to serve as a unified voice for the large and diverse charter movement, and as a force for improving the quality of charter schools. The Alliance’s ultimate goal is to increase the number of high-performing charter schools available to all students, particularly low-income and minority students who lack access to quality public schools.

The Alliance shares one essential purpose with other reform groups: to lead public education to unprecedented levels of academic achievement for all students. Our work is grounded in the belief that chartering can be a powerful catalyst for achieving this purpose. We are inspired and driven by ever-growing evidence that well-run charter schools are particularly effective in closing the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

At the same time, we recognize that chartering can fulfill its promise only if the charter movement becomes more focused on and sophisticated about quality, develops a stronger scaffold of support for its schools, and builds political and policy environments as well as broad public support necessary for charter school success. The Alliance envisions a day when autonomous, high-performing public schools will be the rule, not the exception; flourishing in full-fledged “chartering systems” organized around principles of choice, autonomy, equity, and accountability for results. In these new systems, all public schools will have both direct accountability for results and the necessary operating freedom needed to provide a quality education for all their students.

The best way to hasten that day is to expand the number of states and cities where high-performing charter schools are thriving at scale. To that end, the Alliance has crafted this three-year Strategic Plan.

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