Atlanta Public Schools are harnessing the strengths of traditional public and public charter schools to transform their lowest-performing schools. This model holds promise for Kansas City.
Imagine a traditional neighborhood school with a defined enrollment boundary that serves all students within that boundary. Like any traditional neighborhood school, it follows the district’s transportation and discipline policies. From the outside it looks like any other district school.
This school, however, is different. Because unlike a traditional school, where key decisions regarding time, money, staffing and curriculum are made in the district’s Central Office, key decisions at this neighborhood school are made by school leaders, at the school level. The school’s support and out-of-school programs, consequently, are designed to meet the unique needs of the school’s students and surrounding neighborhoods, rather than through a one-size-fits-most approach.
And because of this more tailored and neighborhood-specific approach, and because of site-based control (that is protected under contract), more organizations are willing to partner with the school, resulting in more community investment in the neighborhood – and, ultimately, reduced student mobility and higher academic outcomes.
Innovating in Atlanta
The school I described above actually exists. It’s Thomasville Heights Elementary School, one of several Atlanta Public Schools “partnership schools,” an effort by APS to turnaround its lowest-performing neighborhood schools by partnering with proven non-profits to operate them.
Thomasville Heights and three other APS schools – an elementary, middle and high school – are run by Purpose Built Schools Atlanta (PBSA), an Atlanta-based non-profit with a community development-centered approach for running schools. Another APS neighborhood school, Gideons Elementary, is run by Kindezi Schools, a local charter school operator with an innovative family-sized classroom model of six to eight students per class. The five schools these organizations took over – which together constitute a K-12 feeder pattern – were the lowest-performing in the APS system.
The APS rationale for these partnerships? It’s refreshingly straightforward: “For some chronically low-performing schools, the needs outweigh the resources that APS can offer on its own. In these cases, we partner with organizations that specialize in school turnaround and can provide the structure, insight and expertise needed.”
APS partnership schools remain traditional APS neighborhood schools and part of the APS family. They operate according to APS policies regarding enrollment, transportation and discipline. They’re not application-based, and they can’t turn students away. They serve all grades. And their enrollment numbers and performance scores are reported under the district.
Time, staffing, money & curriculum
But, unlike their traditional neighborhood counterparts, decisions about time, staffing, money and curriculum (a school’s most important resources) are made at the school level. This is built in to their contract. And in exchange for this autonomy, districts holds partnership schools accountable for their results. This is part of the contract, too.
The APS-PBSA partnership at Thomasville Heights is now in its third year; Kindezi’s partnership at Gideon is in its second. It’s still early, but results are promising. Enrollment is growing. Test scores are up. Because non-profits tend to be more agile and successful at fundraising than centralized school districts, partner schools are benefiting from additional philanthropic investments in pre-school and out-of-school programming. One of those investments is a program that embeds housing lawyers in neighborhood schools to serve the community on a pro bono basis. This investment, which started at Thomasville Heights Elementary under Purpose Built, has helped contribute to a significant reduction in student mobility.
Moving from “either/or” to “both/and”
You could think of Atlanta’s partnership model as “neighborhood schools 2.0.” It’s an approach that brings together the strengths of traditional district neighborhood schools with some of the strengths of the public charter school model. And it’s one way of helping us move the district-charter conversation from “either/or” to “both/and” to improve outcomes for all students.
This partnership model isn’t unique to Atlanta. Rather, it’s a hybrid approach that’s increasingly being used in urban districts grappling with chronically low-performing schools and declining district enrollment – conditions we face here in Kansas City. Rather than closing struggling schools, or letting them gradually be supplanted by new charter schools, these urban districts are taking charge and incentivizing qualified operators, through a competitive process, to instead partner with them. Both parties can win.
In Camden, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania these district-charter partnership schools are called Renaissance Schools. In Indianapolis they’re called Innovation Network Schools. In San Antonio they’re often called 1882 schools, after the legislation that enables them.
The model varies from district to district (some are neighborhood, others are open-enrollment or specialty schools) and operating agreements are negotiated to reflect both district and partner priorities. But the general contours remain the same: the district provides the school building, students, per pupil funding, and select services; the non-profit provides the school model, staffing and expertise, and additional program resources to support the school and school community – and is held accountable by the district for school performance.
Districts that are serious about pursuing partner schools as a strategy for school improvement usually establish an Office of Innovation to support their work. And in cities where a unified enrollment system exists, the district often requires partnership schools to participate in the unified process, bringing additional equity and coherence to a fragmented system (Note: Atlanta does not have a unified enrollment system. Other cities with partnership schools – such as Camden, NJ and San Antonio, TX, do have unified enrollment – and the district requires partner schools to participate).
I’ll continue to write more about partnerships, and other strategies for district-charter collaboration, in future posts. But as we try to find our way onto a more equitable, coherent and higher quality path for Kansas City’s schools and students, I think the basic outlines of the partnership model – capitalizing on the strengths of both traditional district and charter schools while facilitating greater cross-sector collaboration – hold a lot of promise.
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Up next: What we can learn from the recent closure of Benjamin Banneker Charter Academy for Technology, a Kansas City charter school.
