NCSRC’s new English Learners in Charter Schools learning experience offers videos, podcasts, and resources aimed at assisting schools in better serving their EL students during a new school year and beyond.

Module #1 - Transitioning Back to In-Person Learning​: Summarizes lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and ideas to transition ELs back to in-person instruction.

Module #2 - Setting Up Processes and Systems to Serve ELs in Charter Schools​: Guides charter schools who are working to provide rigorous, supportive, and compliant learning environments for ELs.​

Module #3 - Family Engagement - From Recruitment to Ongoing Engagement​: Provides charter schools with practical tips for fostering EL family engagement within their schools.​

The podcast episodes feature the insights and experiences from leaders of EL programs at Uplift Education (TX) and Family Life Academy Charter Schools (NY).

Community partnerships enable charter schools to provide a wide variety of resources and opportunities that improve outcomes for students. How Charter Schools Can Leverage Community Assets through Partnerships is a guide for charter school operators in their design and implementation of community partnerships and can be used by operators in any phase of school development.

NCSRC also hosted a series of Summer Chats featuring interviews with staff members from the schools featured in this report. Go to our website to watch those conversations.

NCSRC recently expanded our database of High-Quality Charter Authorizing Policy Profiles (State Profiles). The current 27 State Profiles represent the CSP State Entity (SE) grantees for years 2017 to 2020 and offer summaries of states’ charter school authorization policy landscape. 

Researchers reviewed legislation and policy in each state against the Policy Framework for High-Quality Charter Authorizing Practices (Framework), identified whether the authorizing practices specified in the Framework were present in state law or policy, and then asked representatives from active SE grantees to review the final profiles for accuracy. The result is a detailed summary of each state’s policies for authorizing new high-quality charter schools. 

Our recent toolkit Identifying Indicators of Distress in Charter Schools: Tools to Support Authorizer Data Collection can help authorizers build on their data collection processes to identify struggling schools prior to failure, and prior to not meeting renewal criteria. 

This toolkit includes tools to help authorizers identify indicators of distress, audit their current data collection methods for evaluating indicators of distress, and assess whether and to what extent the schools in their portfolio are showing indicators of distress.

This toolkit builds on NCSRC’s earlier report, Identifying Indicators of Distress in Charter Schools Part 1: The Role and Perspective of Charter School Authorizers, released in 2020. Both publications are the product of extensive qualitative research and formal interviews with authorizers across policy contexts from a variety of authorizing entities.

The CSP Credit Enhancement Transactions Dashboard is a new interactive tool to explore lending information for grantees of the Credit Enhancement for Charter School Facilities Program (Credit Enhancement Program).

As of 2019, the Credit Enhancement Program, out of the U.S. Department of Education Charter School Programs, has helped leverage approximately $6.7 billion in financing for 766 charter school facilities.

The CSP Credit Enhancement Transactions Dashboard can help charter schools find information about charter school facility lending and connect with lenders to secure lower cost financing for facility projects. 

The Dashboard features:

Questions or feedback? We’re here to help.

The National Charter School Resource Center is maintained by Manhattan Strategy Group (MSG) and our partner WestEd with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Charter School Programs (CSP), under Contract No. GS10F0201T. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Education, and no official endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education should be inferred.

Copyright ©2021 National Charter School Resource Center. All rights reserved.

Your copy should address 3 key questions: Who am I writing for? (Audience) Why should they care? (Benefit) What do I want them to do here? (Call-to-Action)

Create a great offer by adding words like "free" "personalized" "complimentary" or "customized." A sense of urgency often helps readers take an action, so think about inserting phrases like "for a limited time only" or "only 7 remaining!"