Charter School Board Playbook

Governance Is Accountability

KEY QUESTIONS FOR BOARD MEMBERS:

• Do you know the three to five most important strategic goals for the school/network this year?
• Do you know how to measure whether the school is on track to achieve those goals?
• Do you know the key risks that could prevent the school from achieving these goals?
• Do you know if the school is meeting state and authorizer accountability metrics?
• Would you recommend this school to a friend or family member?

Effective governance is, at its core, all about accountability.

The job of charter school authorizers is to hold schools accountable to the terms of the charter contract. If a school is not fulfilling the goals and student achievement expectations, the school can be warned, face requirements and mandates for improvement, or face charter revocation. However, authorizers exercise a lagging accountability. By the time an authorizer raises concerns, a school’s or network’s problems are often deep, entrenched, and sometimes intractable. Boards, on the other hand, have the opportunity and responsibility to exercise leading accountability — in real time. 

School- or network-level boards can identify problems early, track patterns and trends as they emerge, and notice as soon as progress toward goals slows, stalls, or never happens. This is the real value of having school-level boards: Boards can help school leaders shift strategy, change course, adjust tactics, and resolve small issues before they become big problems. Almost all problems and struggles that threaten the success of a charter school are evident long before they become insurmountable. Boards can act when they see early indicators of trouble, rather than react once the school is struggling.

Turning around persistently low-performing schools is notoriously difficult, and sustaining low-performing schools is exactly what the charter sector promised not to do. It’s up to every board to monitor academic and financial performance, think carefully and consistently about the future sustainability of the organization, and recognize when it is time to consider a different plan — and not wait (often years) for the authorizer to weigh in. 

Why don’t boards do this?

Many boards waver on accountability. It can be hard. It often doesn’t feel good, comfortable, or frankly nice. It takes (a lot of) time and energy. It might require stepping outside of both the comfort zone and professional expertise of board members. Many board members prefer to come from a place of humility and respect for school leadership, and feel that holding the leader accountable is inconsistent with that.

In addition to authorizer measures, there are resources that boards can consult to know when to be concerned, such as the Indicators of Distress research as a way for boards to have context for the data they see.

Accountability starts with strategy and goals.

A board and a charter school leader must align on the three to five most important goals for the school each year. Many boards skip over this essential work. Without clarity about and alignment around goals, governance is rudderless. Boards must know the school’s high bar for success (mission), how school leadership plans to get to that bar (strategy), and how to measure progress (goals + metrics). 

Every board member should be able to name the goals that must be achieved each year for the school to provide a high-quality education. This clarity and alignment are best achieved through a thoughtful strategic planning process every three to five years. It’s almost impossible for boards to exercise meaningful accountability without a multiyear strategic plan that clearly lays out, based on context, landscape, and current school performance, what school leadership will do to improve school quality and sustainability, with benchmarks to measure progress. 

The board and school leader then develop annual goals for academic, financial, and operational performance aligned with the strategic plan. Throughout the year, in every committee meeting and board meeting, the board monitors progress towards those goals, using the agreed-upon metrics. This is what accountability looks like in practice.

The best way for boards to exercise this kind of data-informed accountability is to develop, update, and regularly review a dashboard in partnership with the school’s leadership team. The dashboard must:

• Include key academic, financial, and operational goals and the metrics that will be tracked to measure progress toward annual and multiyear goals.
• Update those metrics at regular intervals throughout the school year.
• Indicate important benchmarks organizational sustainability and success, informed by the authorizer framework, metrics set by other stakeholders, and internal school goals. 

The dashboard should be structured to make it easy for the board to:

• Track progress toward each key goal and whether the school is on track to achieve the goal.
• Notice when any important benchmark is missed and flag concerns right away.
• Track patterns and trends over time.
• Know how other schools in the city and state are doing.
• Understand the significance of both “on-track” and “off-track” patterns.

Note that it’s hard work to set appropriate goals. Annual goals should be ambitious yet feasible, realistic and stretch, concrete but nuanced. Resource constraints matter but cannot be used as an excuse. Not all goals are quantitative, but progress needs to be measurable. 

In addition, anecdotes are not data. We love to see boards hear stories of success, examples of the mission in action, and high points. But, effective governance is fueled by data, not stories, and governance by anecdote rarely leads to the right decisions.

Boards Must Ensure Students Are Learning

KEY QUESTIONS FOR BOARD MEMBERS:

• Are the school’s students meeting or exceeding grade-level expectations?
• Is student academic performance growing at or above the expected rate?
• Are there differences between groups of students?
• Is school leadership ensuring high-quality instructional materials and accompanying training for teachers are available?
• Are resources — including money and time — allocated toward improving student proficiency and growth?

Effective boards track progress toward high expectations for all students.

Think about a time you were part of a team that won. Any kind of team – sports, workplace, academic. In all likelihood, that team won because all teammates shared a clear sense of what you wanted to achieve, you worked together to achieve it, you allocated roles based on each teammate’s strengths, you measured your progress along the way, and you made big and small adjustments to stay on track to the goal. Every board is a team, and that team mentality is a great way to think about governance. 

The most important job of a school is to provide an excellent education that ensures that students gain the skills, knowledge, and experiences that will equip them to thrive. Effective boards partner with school leadership to set strategic direction and clear goals for student success, and then consistently monitor progress toward those goals. When the school is not on track to meet its strategic goals for students, board members must dial up support and oversight, not dial back expectations. They cannot be passive, reactive, or complacent. 

Every member of an effective board knows the most important metrics of student success. This starts with knowing the state’s/authorizer’s accountability targets/standards, which the board is required to measure. Generally, however, the authorizer’s metrics are the minimum, not the maximum. Boards need to understand the key factors that influence whether students in the school are thriving, as outlined in a strong strategic plan. 

Once the board clearly understands the academic goals, effective boards monitor the agreed-upon metrics consistently throughout each year in alignment with the school’s broader strategic plan and dashboard — all with an eye on student outcomes, well-being, and success. To do this, boards need:

• Discipline: At the outset of every school year, board members should be clear about the school’s key goals and what metrics they will monitor for each goal, and track progress toward those goals consistently.
• Information: Board members need regular updates on these key indicators from school staff, as well as annual information from the authorizer each summer/early fall.
• Courage: If the school is off track on one or more of those key indicators, the board must notice and take action.

This work is led by the academic committee of the board. At the beginning of each school year, the academic committee should set benchmarks for both current-year and longer-term student academic outcomes, and at every committee meeting, monitor whether the school is on or off track to meet those benchmarks. If one or more of these benchmarks is not hit, the committee should raise a red flag, as these are early indicators of distress that require board attention.  

The job of the academic committee is to understand why (and which) students are not on track, provide needed support, offer guidance and encouragement to leadership, and continue to track data to ensure that challenges are addressed. While not every board member will have school or instructional expertise, all board members can bring experience from different sectors with monitoring progress toward clearly stated objectives and measures. 

Some advice based on our experience working with hundreds of boards:

Boards Ensure the School Has an Effective Leader

KEY QUESTIONS FOR BOARD MEMBERS:

• Do you know what excellent leadership for your school or network looks like? Do you have an updated job description for your school leader, and a set of relevant leadership competencies?
• Does the board evaluate the leader every year?
• Is the board clear on how to support the leader in achieving goals and overcoming challenges?
• Does the leader have a highly effective leadership team supporting progress toward those goals?
• Is the school leader improving their performance in the role year over year? How do you know?
• Are you prepared for leader succession?

Every charter school needs a strong school leader. This is the board’s responsibility. 

Every charter school needs a strong leader at the helm to achieve its mission, accelerate student achievement, hire and develop great teachers, and lead the organization to long-term sustainability. This is perhaps the most important factor for a successful school, and this is one of the most important roles of a charter school board. Boards are responsible for hiring a qualified and experienced school leader, and then for playing all the roles a manager plays in a workplace, including:

• Supporting that leader with substantive thought partnership, problem-solving, and strategic insights. 
• Monitoring and evaluating the leader’s performance, updating job description and competencies each year.
• Investing in the leader’s development and improvement. 
• Recognizing the leader’s success. 
• Compensating the leader fairly. 
• Preparing for leader succession well before it happens, including both emergency succession and planned departure. 

Almost every board we know wants to do their best to support the school leader, but most boards struggle to play all these roles well. Most boards want to support the school leader. They recognize how hard that person works on behalf of students, teachers, and families, and they want the person to stay in the job. But boards that support without also holding leaders accountable are doing only half their job, and these boards miss signs of trouble all the time. They also miss opportunities to be supportive in ways that are actually helpful to the leader. 

The relationship between the board and the leader is a formal and professional relationship. The dynamic should not be casual, chummy, or unstructured. While personal “fit” and closeness are often important features of the board-school leader relationship, they cannot be the primary nature of the relationship. The board should be a critical friend, not just a supportive friend, to the school leader — that “tough friend” who sometimes says the hard thing you don’t want to hear, even though you know they’re probably right.

The board governs; the school leader manages.

We get asked all the time how boards can better balance governance and management, or “stay in the governance lane.” The truth is, everything in this playbook is intended to define what governance is in practice. There is no magic wand to calibrate the balance of governance and management within each organization. Finding that balance requires ongoing honest conversations between the board and the school leader to continue to clarify the roles of each and hold each other accountable for everything laid out throughout this playbook. 

These conversations can be hard, and we recommend finding structures and templates that work for you. One template we like to align on to strike the right balance between the board and the school leader is below.

It’s surprisingly hard to maintain the right balance in the board-school leader relationship.

• Leaders don’t want boards that are too hands-on, but boards that are too hands-off don’t know enough to be helpful at all. 
• Leaders appreciate getting good ideas and advice from experienced and knowledgeable board members, but they don’t want to hear off-topic, ill-informed, or irrelevant suggestions.
• Leaders know that the more informed board members are, the more likely they are to give good input, but it takes a lot of time to keep board members updated, and they worry that too much information opens the door to micromanagement.

We often hear well-meaning board members say to school leaders, “We’re here if you need us.” This is lovely … and passive. School leaders need board members who are in the work with them, standing alongside them, not just behind them. School leaders need board members who are in the work with them, standing beside them, not just behind them. We encourage board members to instead ask how to help, listen carefully to the leader’s requests and respond specifically, and request feedback on whether what they do is, in fact, helpful. For example, board members can ask:

• “We understand that it would be helpful to you if we attended training/spent more time preparing for board meetings/prioritized committee meeting participation/attended fundraising events. We are planning to do X by Y date. Would that be helpful?”

To lead the ongoing work of nurturing this balanced, complex relationship, every board should establish a school leader support and evaluation committee composed of two board members.

The school leader support and evaluation committee:

• Leads the board’s collaboration with the school leader throughout the year.
• Ensures that the board and leader align on the three to five most important strategic goals at the beginning of each school year and on the metrics the board will track to measure progress. 
• Leads the evaluation of the school leader, including midyear check-in, data gathering, and annual formal evaluation.
  • Check-ins should be organized around monitoring progress toward goals.
  • Evaluation should be structured and comprehensive.
  • Feedback should be accurate and honest, positive and constructive.
• Works with the school leader to update the following every year:
  • The school leader’s annual goals, tied to the school’s mission and aligned with its multiyear strategic plan.
  • The competencies the board expects the leader to demonstrate.
  • The school leader’s job description, to help the board understand the leader’s responsibilities, including how they allocate their time and how their role has evolved.
  • An organizational chart and high-level job descriptions for leadership staff, to inform the board’s understanding of how well the leader hires, delegates, and supports their direct reports.
  • Internal leadership capacity, instructional quality, and leadership’s assessment of risks.

In our experience, boards generally want to support the school leader but may not know how.

Strong boards offer a professional, helpful, and rigorous annual evaluation of school leaders.

Every school leader deserves, and every board is responsible for conducting, a professional annual evaluation that includes input from direct reports, feedback on core leadership competencies, recognition of accomplishments, and constructive feedback for growth. Yet too many school leaders have never been given a “real” evaluation by their boards. Many get no evaluation at all, and others just have an informal conversation with the board chair.

One of the most important ways a board can support and retain a strong leader is by evaluating their performance through a formal annual evaluation that incorporates feedback from staff and key stakeholders, measures performance against goals and demonstration of competencies, and delivers actionable feedback to the school leader. Boards that do an effective job at leader evaluation increase the chances that high-performing school leaders stay longer in their jobs, which is pivotal in improving student success.

Note: *The school leader evaluation cycle should be driven by when data from the previous academic year is available. 

Why do so many boards shy away from effectively evaluating the leader who reports to them?

• Evaluation can feel negative, punitive, or even threatening to school leaders, who might fear for their job security, lack trust in the board, or wonder whether board members really understand their jobs. 
• Many boards are not well-equipped to conduct an evaluation; they may not have members with experience in performance evaluation, executive/school leadership, or human resources. Boards also often lack training on and capacity for leader evaluation. Given the sensitive nature of performance evaluation, they may not know how to design good survey questions, have experience handling varying feedback, or want to involve the school’s human resources director.
• It is hard for boards to accurately assess leader performance without fully understanding the nuances and demands of the complicated job of leading a school. Most boards don’t have updated job descriptions and benchmarks for strong performance for the school leader position, and thus the evaluation happens in somewhat of a vacuum. 
• Many board members feel they themselves don’t have enough insight to fairly assess performance, and they sometimes also inaccurately interpret feedback from direct reports — they mistake anecdotes for data, overweight outlier feedback, mischaracterize input from staff and parents, and/or entirely miss key aspects of context that impact performance.
• Many boards don’t realize they are responsible for setting compensation for the school leader each year and working with the human resources function in the school/network to manage compensation increases.

Boards must always be prepared for school leader succession.

It’s the responsibility of the board to make sure the school has a strong leader in place at all times. We generally recommend that boards invest time and energy into keeping their current leader if that leader is effective, as school leader transitions are challenging, time-consuming, and usually disruptive. However, leader transitions are inevitable, and many boards don’t lay the groundwork for successful and smooth transitions.

Succession planning isn’t just writing out a plan and then shelving it until you need it. The steps boards need to take to be prepared for succession are part of the year-in, year-out work of being an engaged, effective board. To be prepared at all times for eventual leader succession, we recommend that boards:

• Leverage a search firm for access to resources and networks, and complement/tailor with strong board support and knowledge of the needs/context of the school.
• Be deliberate about engaging staff and the school community and communicate updates regularly.
• Approach internal candidates and interim leaders thoughtfully.
• Consider what role the outgoing leader can or should play in the search and transition process, and note that this may depend on the context and if it is a founding leader.
• Develop a robust onboarding plan and allow the new leader ample time to transition.

Great Boards Prioritize Effective Governance Structures, Processes, and Practices

KEY QUESTIONS FOR BOARD MEMBERS:

• Do meetings start and end on time, and feel like a great use of time?
• Are all board members consistently engaged, informed, and motivated?
• Are board and committee discussions energetic, robust, data-driven, and important? 
• Do board members bring a range of lived and professional experiences to the table?
• Does your board run a tight ship, with clear structures and practices that feel professional, cohesive, and coherent?

Too many boards are much too loose, and that looseness puts schools at risk, prevents boards from being as helpful and supportive as they could be, and limits the effectiveness of board oversight.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• ”We don’t need committees; it takes too much time, and we’re fine.” 
• “No one on the board has time to learn how to use a portal or Google Drive.” 
• “No, we don’t look at our bylaws; I’m sure we’re fine.” 
• “Truthfully, a few people do all the work, but I don’t think they mind.”
• “We have had the same board chair since the school was founded 18 years ago. In fact, most of our board members have been on the board for at least 10 years. We can’t let the institutional memory go.”

Solid governance infrastructure is not optional, and it is not pick-and-choose.

Sound governance practices, processes, and structures are the nonnegotiable infrastructure of effective governance, legal compliance, consistent board member engagement, and steady leadership on strategy and accountability. Boards that don’t function with this infrastructure in place are putting their schools at risk. We know from working with hundreds of boards that the better the infrastructure, the better the experience for board members, value for school leaders, and odds of success for the school.

Charter school leaders and board members should not waste time debating the finer points of governance and reinventing the wheel. Students and staff need the board to focus on the most important strategic issues, not endlessly circle around how to function. This section lays out the essentials of good governance in order to save boards the time of creating them.

This work is led by the governance committee. We believe that for most boards, the governance committee should take the place of the executive committee. The governance committee is responsible for making sure the board functions well; unlike an executive committee, this committee does not have authority to act on behalf of the full board (authority we do not believe should rest with any committee). 

You need a great board chair.

A high-functioning board chair is a must for an effective board. The board chair certainly should not be expected to do the lion’s share of the work of the board, but a weak board chair is an almost impossible hurdle for a board to overcome. Great board chairs:

• Act as a critical friend, thought partner, and trusted adviser to the school leader.
  • Invest in the relationship to strengthen the leader’s efficacy and the school’s performance. 
  • Seek and accept feedback without defensiveness to get better in the role.
• Understand that their primary job is to organize the board to ensure that the school is providing an excellent education. They know what a great school is and how to measure it, and they know what a great board does and how to measure that. Board chairs often need extra training and support from sector organizations to understand this.
• Are willing to effectively “run” the board with a steady hand and steadfast leadership — celebrating and recognizing excellent board members, keeping meetings running on time (even if it means cutting off people who want to speak), calling out disengaged or disruptive members, and allocating board time to the most important strategic priorities for school success. 
  • When board chairs single out exceptional board members and recognize them, board culture improves and other board members up their game.
  • When board chairs are willing to have honest, tough conversations with board members who are not doing their job, even going so far as asking them to step down if necessary, board culture improves and other board members up their game.
• Are really, really in it to win it. They understand what role to play and when, they are available to the school leader and other board members, they care about the school, and they go out of their way to stay informed, engaged, and enthusiastic. 
• Genuinely respect, trust, and like the school leader — and are willing to say hard things, give difficult feedback, share tough truths, and disagree.
• Want training, support, and advice on how to succeed in the role.
• Know who the next board chair is at all times.

The people on the board make or break the board.

Good governance starts with who’s on the team. Board members bring lived and professional experience that can help school leaders make sound decisions. A school leader cannot be expected to bring deep expertise in financial management, legal matters, human resources, public relations, fundraising, and community organizing in addition to their experience in instruction and school leadership. A strong board has members with experience in these areas who can contribute to discussions and share insights and perspectives from their fields. Collectively, this shared leadership leads to better decision-making — and better outcomes for students.

Board composition must be aligned with the strategic priorities of the school. The governance committee should maintain a board composition matrix aligned with the school’s strategic priorities. The matrix should include what professional and lived experiences can help the board achieve those priorities and a running three-year recruiting arc of priorities, terms, and committee makeup.

(Note: Bellwether’s matrix template includes a list of many kinds of experience and perspectives boards need; each board can prioritize based on the current school goals and board members.)

Overall, we offer the following advice regarding board composition:

• Be strategic, not reactive, about who is on the board.
  • If academic improvement is paramount, include multiple people with experience in education, school improvement, student data, and strategy.
  • If facilities are at the top of the list, include people with experience in facilities financing, real estate development, capital campaigns, etc.
  • If staff quality or turnover are the main challenges, include people with experience leading a large team, human resources and workplace culture, and C-suite leadership roles.
• Be specific about what the board needs.
  • “Finance experience” is a very broad category. Does the school’s board need an accountant? Someone who has managed multimillion-dollar budgets? Someone who understands school finance and allocating resources to student success?
  • The same holds true for education; a former teacher doesn’t bring the same level of experience and insight as a former school leader, or chief financial officer, or human resources director.
• Be clear, consistent, and professional in how the board finds, interviews, selects, and onboards new members.

Our advice for boards about strategic board composition: 

Be disciplined about focusing board member time on tracking progress toward goals.

Board members actually spend a remarkably little amount of time together every year, considering the nature of the decisions boards make. It takes significant time and thought to make sure that every hour board members spend together is time well spent. Most of this time is spent in either board meetings or committee meetings.

How this time is structured, the objectives of each meeting, and the value of this time is primarily the responsibility of the board chair. Time spent in board and committee meetings should be strategic, substantive, and organized around the annual goals. Board chairs plan and lead board meetings, assign board members to committees, and monitor committee engagement.

Effective board meetings require preparation weeks in advance. Strategies for success include: 

• Meeting agendas always include three clear objectives for the meeting; the board chair checks in during the last five minutes of the meeting on whether the board achieved those objectives.
• The board chair knows how to facilitate a meeting and stick to the times on the agenda, and also knows when an issue is important enough to make an exception. 
• Board meeting agendas prioritize structured, well-facilitated discussions about progress to the key priorities and goals for the year, informed by committee.
  • There should be a logical sequence of discussions over the year that lines up with when data is available and when the board needs to make key decisions.
  • The board follows an annual calendar to ensure discussions and decisions happen when they need to happen.
• The board secretary keeps a running list of to-dos and follow-ups to share out after the meeting.
• The board completes a quick, three-to-five-question survey at the end of each meeting to ask members if the meeting was a great use of time and moved important work forward.

Every effective board operates with a robust committee structure. Each board committee reviews the section of the dashboard relevant to that committee at every meeting. The job of each committee is to dive more deeply into a set of data around the goals in that committee’s area, discuss any off track metrics, and maintain ongoing discussion of the actions school leadership takes to improve. 

Bellwether recommends every board have at least three core committees (governance, finance, and academic), plus a school leader support and evaluation committee. These committees typically meet at least once between board meetings and lead a subset of priority work for the year.

• Each committee has a workplan for the year.
• Committees include both board members and staff members, working together to understand progress toward goals and discuss strategy, challenges, and patterns/trends in the data.
• Committee meetings spend no more than 50% of the time listening to staff reports.
• All full-board discussions and decisions have been discussed in committees first.

Getting board culture right attracts great board members.

A charter school board is not a casual, informal group of people who have come together because they love the school and want to “give back.” The board of a public charter school is a legal entity with legal and fiduciary requirements and responsibilities, stewarding millions of dollars of public funds and holding the education of children in its hands. The culture of the board should reflect that responsibility.

Culture is shaped to a large extent by board expectations and norms, also called a board member agreement or board member job description. These expectations should articulate the responsibilities of every board member and clearly indicate how board members are expected to show up. It’s critical that boards 1) set high expectations for attendance and participation commensurate with the high-stakes nature of board work; and 2) have members who are enthusiastic, energetic, committed to the success of the organization, and prepared to make their board service a priority. In practice, this means:

• The board, led by the governance committee, creates and then annually updates a set of expectations and norms, which become a board member agreement.
• Every board member signs this agreement every year.
• The board chair meets with every member annually to review performance, tracks engagement throughout the year, and recognizes excellent and engaged board members for their service.
• Board members who don’t uphold these expectations and norms are removed from the board.

Culture also depends on relationships. We know that many board members are reluctant or unable to take time to get to know one another through social opportunities outside of board meetings. Board service already takes a lot of time, and asking people to spend more time away from their families or jobs is tough. However, when board members don’t know one another, it is hard to have the kind of robust discussions, disagreements, healthy tensions, and uncomfortable interactions that effective board work often requires. We find that when board members don’t take the time to get to know one another, governance suffers.

Great Boards Engage in the School Community and Local Education Sector

This section will offer guidance on how boards can: 

• Understand the context within which the school operates. 
• Engage with families and staff appropriately. 
• Support high-quality school choices for all families in their community. 

Board members need to understand the education sector in their city and state.

If you were on the board of a cereal company, it wouldn’t be enough to understand your own company’s products and sales. You would need to know a decent amount about the breakfast industry. What kind of cereal do other companies sell? Do they sell more or less than your company? What else do consumers eat for breakfast? Are they eating more or less cereal than they used to? Why? And you would need some familiarity with the customer base for your products, both current customers and the customers you would like to attract.

The same is true for board members of a public charter school. Too many charter school board members know very little about the context within which their school operates — and within which their school competes for students, teachers, and resources. What other schools are nearby? What grades do they serve? How is their program similar to or different from your school? How are students in those schools doing? Why do parents and students choose to attend (or not attend) your school? 

Accountability is the board’s primary job. While we understand that it’s hard for board members to also spend time understanding a school’s external context, that understanding is a vital part of that accountability. Effective board members are connected to the broader education community and understand the context within which their school operates.

It’s impossible for a board to govern effectively without knowing:

• The basics of what public charter schools are — public schools, publicly funded, publicly accountable, open to all students — and who authorizes charter schools.
• The current and projected context for charter schools regarding funding, authorizing, accountability, political support, and policy.
• Charter market share in the city and state (what number and what percentage of students are in charter schools, and how that has changed over time).
• Size, growth, location, and student performance of peer schools, including new schools opening, schools merging/acquiring other schools, and schools getting shut down by the authorizer. 
• Emerging economic realities and predictions, including rising costs, stressful facilities situations, market competition from private school choice and other options — all amid the end of a huge influx of federal education funding.
• Demographic projections that impact school enrollment.
• The quality of the authorizer, state charter association, and charter school law in the school’s city and state.
• Trends in staffing and compensation in the city and state.

These factors affect school sustainability, and boards must stay updated to inform their decision-making and oversight. 

Building trust among staff and parents is vital to effective governance.

Many charter school parents and staff don’t realize that their school is governed by its own board, not the district school board. Boards often overlook opportunities to help educate parents and staff about the role of a charter school board and introduce themselves. Typically, parents and staff hear from boards primarily when something “big” happens — often a crisis. To build visibility and trust, board members can:

• Be visible and enthusiastic supporters of the school at arts or sporting events, milestones like the first day of school or graduation, and teacher appreciation days, among others.
• Send newsletters or other communications to the school community at least once a semester, if not more often, sharing what the board is working on, introducing board members, and asking for feedback. 
• Seek input on important issues in appropriate ways, being proactive about hearing from all families and staff (not just the vocal ones), and learning how to listen without promising anything, contradicting anyone, or undermining school leadership.

Schools must have clear policies in place for how board members should and should not communicate with school staff and families, how complaints and grievances are handled, and how people can bring matters to the school’s attention. Parents, staff, and board members should be trained every year on these policies and they should appear in the parent, staff, and board handbooks. Board members should also have solid knowledge about the school, its program, performance, and pertinent facts to avoid sharing inaccurate, outdated, or misleading information.

Board members can be powerful advocates for wider access to high-quality school choices.

All families deserve excellent schools for their children. If the school in a neighborhood is not strong or does not meet their child’s needs, every parent should have other options, regardless of their income or ZIP code. That is the underlying promise of public charter schools: Money should not be the determining factor in the quality of education available to children.

Board members have a unique opportunity to urge policymakers and regulators/authorizers to take action to clear obstacles for schools, appeal to funders and donors to seek the support schools need, and recruit prospective new board members. Charter school board members see firsthand how hard it is to run a great school and the obstacles school leaders face. They develop compassion and respect for the work that educators do every day in challenging circumstances. They learn what policies, support, authorizing practices, and resources schools need to succeed. This experience equips board members to be extremely effective advocates for what schools need to better serve their students. 

Every board member should feel they are part of the broader education sector with a stake in the decisions that policymakers and authorizers make that affect every school, including their own. By using their voices, knowledge, passion, and networks, board members can create more opportunities for high-quality public school options for all families in a community.

Charter School Boards Need Support and Direction from the Charter Ecosystem 

If organizations charged with leading the charter school sector elevate and invest in stronger boards, school quality will increase. Across the sector, charter school authorizers and support organizations have an exciting opportunity to commit to holding boards accountable for exercising oversight.

The constellation of charter school incubators, authorizers, funders, and other support organizations that make the charter sector’s work possible typically invest in and work with school leaders, and for the most part leave it to the school leaders to deal with their boards. This is partly why so many charter schools and networks falter when a strong and charismatic founder leaves the organization. As the charter sector continues to mature and face mounting challenges, its leadership ecosystem has an opportunity to elevate, incentivize, and reward effective boards, because it’s the boards, not, ultimately, school founders or leaders, who own and drive enduring organizational sustainability and impact.

The charter ecosystem can transform how boards see their role by reinforcing that:

• Every school leader reports to their boards, not the other way around.
• Every board holds the charter, and is responsible for holding the school accountable for achieving its mission.
• It is the board’s job to take action as proactively as possible if the school is not fulfilling that mission. 

Rarely, if ever, do we see ecosystem organizations communicate directly with the board members or chair, or share key information about the school’s success. This lack of communication effectively creates a game of telephone, where the school leader has to decide what information to share with board members and how. We believe it would help boards govern more effectively if they learn directly from these ecosystem organizations the expectations for the school and the board, where they can go for support, and what effective governance entails. In fact, many board members don’t know what “good” looks like. They may not have the context to know the measures of a great school. They have not been told or trained to regularly review information about school performance and measure that against a standard of school excellence. 

First, every authorizer should take action to assess board quality, require improvement, and measure whether governance is improving. To do this, the authorizer needs a definition of effective governance and a way to measure the effectiveness of the boards of applying schools and schools up for renewal. Good authorizers meet with board members regularly. There is no substitute for face-to-face conversations to assess whether board members are engaged or not. If the board chair doesn’t understand the performance and health of the school; if most board members fail to show up for authorizer meetings; and if board members miss authorizer deadlines/requirements, ignore authorizer communications, etc., these are indications that authorizer action is needed.

Second, local charter school funders, such as education champion organizations, should develop a charter school board dashboard relevant to the context in their cities, share the dashboard with board members in their portfolio, and provide training to board members on how to use it. This dashboard should incorporate benchmarks of school success and distress to guide board oversight. In addition, we encourage funders to include effective governance as a requirement for funding.

Third, state charter associations can offer tools and resources to the boards in their membership, including board self-assessment tools. They can also frequently inform boards — not just school leaders — about the big issues affecting schools in the state so that each board does not have to seek this out on its own.

Finally, we strongly encourage these ecosystem organizations to collaborate with one another to support strong charter school boards in local communities, towns/cities, and states.

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Bellwether is a national nonprofit that exists to transform education to ensure systemically marginalized young people achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Founded in 2010, we work hand in hand with education leaders and organizations to accelerate their impact, inform and influence policy and program design, and share what we learn along the way. For more, visit bellwether.org.