Charter School Facilities Initiative

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Charter School Facilities Initiative

The Charter School Facilities Initiative (CSFI) is a national initiative, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and headed by the Colorado League of Charter Schools, to research and quantify charter school access to adequate educational facilities space and funding.

Charter school laws across the country place the burden of obtaining and paying for facilities on the charter schools themselves. As a result, charter schools often struggle to find suitable and affordable facilities, and charter leaders routinely identify facilities as one of their top challenges of running a school.

The Charter School Facilities Initiative (CSFI) will improve policy and practice by collecting and disseminating comprehensive data regarding the state of charter school access to quality facilities and using that data to help influence and improve charter school facilities policies across the nation.

Goals

Support better policy and practice through industry leading data.
National dataset allowing cross state analysis.
State level reports allowing for localized policy changes.
Ultimately, the CSFI will support individual state efforts and serve to build a national database of charter school facility data.
Establish nationally reliable figures about key measures related to charter facilities.
Cross reference state specific data against National Alliance Model Law sections on facilities to measure the impact various policy measures have on facility costs and adequacy.
Cross reference facility quality against student performance data.

How it Began

In 2007, based on anecdotal reports and considerable time spent across Colorado's charter community, it was clear that inadequate and costly facilities were the norm. Fifteen years into the charter experience, state policy continued to provide an inadequate and inequitable structure for charter school capital needs. In response, the Colorado League of Charter Schools (the League) commissioned a 2010 Task Force to build the case for changes to remove barriers to adequate and equitable access to public school facilities and financing for Colorado charter schools. While the need to improve the landscape of charter school facilities and facilities financing was evident within the charter community, the League understood that anecdotes and hearsay were insufficient to influence policy makers; a key missing piece was reliable data on the condition and cost of charter school facilities. In order to provide reliable data in support of the League's Task Force objectives, the League developed a comprehensive survey, the Charter School Facilities Survey, to gather objective, reliable facilities data from Colorado's charter community.

The League published the results of the Charter School Facilities Surveyin a 2008 report entitled, Shortchanged Charters: How Funding Disparities Hurt Colorado's Charter Schools. The Report, and the data the survey revealed, provided the League's Task Force with the necessary information to build its policy framework.

Since then the League has been able to leverage that combination of data and policy to make substantial gains in its facilities efforts. For example, the League was able to successfully obtain more capital construction funds for charter schools, make legislative changes that required school districts to include district authorized charter schools in bond election discussions, and provide for the inclusion of charter schools as eligible applicants in the Colorado Building Excellent Schools Today program, a competitive grant program that provides funding to school districts and charter schools for capital construction projects.

How it Evolved

Seeing the success of the Colorado facilities initiative, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ("the Alliance") partnered with the League to use the Colorado facilities survey model in other states to assess the charter facilities landscape across the country.

In a pilot program spanning six months in 2010-11, the League and the Alliance partnered with state charter school organizations (CSOs) in Georgia, Indiana and Texas to collect state‐specific data comparable to what took place in Colorado. In 2011, New York and Tennessee joined the project. And in 2012, Idaho, Michigan and New Jersey will come on board as well.

The results are published in a series of state‐specific reports jointly authored by the League, the Alliance, and respective CSO partners.

Since hard data continues to be a more effective method of improving policy around charter school facilities access, the League and the Alliance are continuing their facilities efforts. Thanks to funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the League and the Alliance will partner with 3 additional states in 2012 to expand the facilities initiative and data available.

The end goal of the CSFI is to partner with 12-16 states representing diversity in:

Size
Region
Number of Schools

Partner states will ultimately represent 50% of the country's total charter school population to create a representative, national dataset. The findings will be compiled into a national database as empirical evidence of national trends around charter school access to facilities and financing.

Contact

For more information about CSFI, contact Jessica M. Johnson, Esq., Director of Advocacy Programs at 303-989-5356, x121.