The charter schools sector has changed public education in our nation. After just 20 years, charter schools now make up more than five percent of all public schools across the country and serve more than 2 million students. At current growth rates, the charter sector will serve 3 million students in another 3.5 years and 5 million within 8 years. Charter schools are a permanent and growing segment of our public schools system.
In order to satisfy the overwhelming parent and student demand for more high quality public school options, we need to create more schools, hire more teachers, and locate more leaders. NAPCS estimated in 2008 that the public charter school movement would need to find between 6,000 and 21,000 new school leaders over the next 10 years in order to keep pace with the growth of the sector. While the upper estimate is likely a bit high, demand for charters still exceeds supply by a significant amount. In 2012, NAPCS estimated that more than 600,000 students remained on waitlistsfor charter schools across the nation. That means we need almost 2,000 more charter schools just to find seats for these children. And, we need at least that many new leaders to open new charter schools and take over for retiring leaders of established ones. The charter sector has attracted a significant amount of new talent to the sector. Since there is no special certification required to lead a charter school in many states, the sector HAS drawn in a large number of entrepreneurial leaders from other fields. Leaders of several highly successful charter schools, including Deborah Kenny of Harlem Village Academies, John Danner of Rocketship Education and Dacia Toll of Achievement First, did not take traditional routes to school leadership (i.e. teacher, assistant principal, principal). In cities like New Orleans, New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit and Washington, D.C., high concentration of charter schools have created thriving talent markets. Unfortunately, despite the ability to attract talent from outside normal pools, the sector still cannot keep pace with demand. Further, since experience outside the education realm doesn’t guarantee success in the education field, we should not merely attempt to bring in large numbers of outsiders and expect success. More than likely, additional supports are necessary. Tomorrow on The Charter Blog, we’ll look at some of the larger nonprofit charter school networks that have developed in-house training programs for future leaders. Photo: Deborah Kenny of Harlem Village Academies, who took a nontraditional path into school leadership, speaking with Bill Bosby at the 2012 National Charter Schools Conference.
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