National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

June 22, 2009
Conference in Washington, D.C.
Prepared remarks by Allan Golston, President, United States Program

What do we mean by success?

At the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our work is driven by a belief that all lives have equal value. Around the world, we focus on interventions in health and agricultural productivity in the hopes of fighting disease and reducing extreme poverty. 

In the United States, this belief means to us that the opportunity to have a healthy and productive life shouldn’t be pre-determined by what zip code you live in ... or how much your parents make.

And if you’re looking for a place where one investment can result in the largest increase in opportunity—it’s education.

Why education?

I think back to the old story about the bank robber Willie Sutton. “Why do you rob banks, Willie?” a reporter asked him. “Because that’s where the money is,” he answered. We concentrate on education—because that’s where the opportunity is.

You all know the numbers. If you don’t finish high school, you’re three times more likely to be unemployed than someone who finished college. 

Between 2006 and 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that jobs requiring postsecondary education will grow at nearly twice the rate of jobs that don’t.

As the head of our foundation’s work in the United States, I look at it this way:

Economic viability is the key to fighting inequity. A post-high school degree or credential is the path to a job that allows for economic viability—and completing high-school ready for college is a prerequisite for both.

Therefore, our definition of success is as simple as it is profound: We want to dramatically increase the number of students who graduate from high school ready for college and then go on to get a degree or credential that lets them get a good job.

So we believe that success means that every child leaves school with the skills necessary to open the doors of opportunity: in essence every young person in America should be able to pursue college success without the need for remedial courses. And for us, success is how much progress we can make towards that goal, and how quickly we can make it.

In pursuit of those ends, we’re not loyal to any approach or institution or school of thought. We’re loyal to results.

Many of you in this room have generated great results, both in terms of educating kids and in experimenting with new approaches that can be applied across our education system.

In almost every case, you’ve done more with less—at least 22 percent fewer dollars per student on average.

Today, I want to focus on one of two education programs underway at the Gates Foundation—our college-ready work and the important role charters play in advancing that strategy.

Bill and Melinda Gates and I have both seen the amazing work you’re doing with our own eyes. The commitment of the people you’ve brought together and the difference you make in children’s lives are deeply inspiring, deeply moving, and deeply necessary.

Like you, we believe that every child can learn—and that every child can meet high expectations if they’re given the tools and support they need.

The importance of high expectations is a lesson I learned early in life.

When I was growing up in Denver, my parents both worked two jobs. Whenever we could, we’d eat dinner together. It was a great opportunity to be together as a family, talk and catch up on everything. For my father, perversely, this was also a great opportunity to develop and test our reading and comprehension skills.

During dinner, he would get out the paper—we got The Denver Post—and then turn to a random article. And then he would quiz my brothers and me on the information or details in that article. Since we didn’t know ahead of time which article he’d pick, we had to read the entire paper beforehand.

By the way, he never picked an article in the sports section.

At the time, I thought, “Why is he doing this? This is just mean. I have no idea what he’s going to ask me, and this is terrible, and I have to spend this time trying to figure it out.”

As I got older, I came to appreciate that because he had high expectations for me to know things in our community and in the world, I learned them.

So we all sensed intuitively that high expectations, matched with the tools to fulfill those expectations, yields results.

But we needed to show it if we ever wanted to scale it.

That’s why, as you look at the evolution of our foundation’s strategy, we first tried to help charters clear the barriers to entry—the startup costs that could keep charters from getting off the ground. 

At this initial stage, choice and flexibility were ends unto themselves.

If we wanted to see what worked, parents needed the choice to try something different, and schools needed the flexibility to try new approaches.

Those investments—and your work—have taught us a lesson both simple and powerful: all students can succeed.

In Houston, I visited a YES prep school where 95 percent of the students are African-American or Hispanic. Eighty percent are economically disadvantaged. Schools with similar demographics send fewer than 10 percent of their students to college. When I was there, Chris Barbic, who I believe is here today, told me that for the eighth year in a row, 100 percent of their graduates were accepted into four-year colleges, including some of the top universities in the country. Ninety-one percent of YES alumni have either graduated from or are still enrolled in a two- or four-year college .

Those results aren’t limited to one school or one CMO.

The Inner City Education Fund in L.A. is seeing something similar. At View Park Prep, from the 2008 graduating class of 67 seniors, all African-American, 58 are attending four-year universities, with one with the Air Force and the others at two-year schools. This isn’t the result of the school winnowing its weakest students through dropouts or transfers. Sixty-six of the 67 students who started at View Park in the ninth grade were in that graduating class—this in an area where the dropout rate is believed to exceed 50 percent.

All students can succeed. That’s the belief that guides our work today.

But we must also be honest with ourselves. While many charters are outpacing traditional district schools, far too many charters are not performing at the level our students need them to be. And a charter that replicates the performance of the school it replaced just re-arranges the deck chairs on a ship going nowhere.

That is why, as Don Shalvey says, successful charters must continue to be the “purposeful test kitchens” of American education.

By the way, I want to join you in congratulating Don for being a pioneer in this movement. We are very excited to have him as part our team at the Gates Foundation. It’s not often that a team gets to sign a hall of famer to their roster. We’re lucky to have him.

Don’s statement artfully makes the point that while there is a wonderful story to be written about every life changed, every spark of learning that is ignited in a young mind, every horizon that is broadened—charter schools still serve less than 3 percent of American students.

The greatest stories are still limited ones.

So our challenge today is to better understand quality, raise quality, and then turn it into quantity.

That means more than just doubling the recipe with more high-quality charters—it means that we’ll also have to start sharing the recipe even more widely.

For a long time, charters were, by design and necessity, a world apart from the public school systems in which they operated.

But they can’t be any longer if we are to get to a point where every student graduates from high school truly ready for college.

Already, we’re seeing entire school systems transformed by the presence of charters within them. 

Look at what is happening in Albany, New York. Albany’s public schools serve a population that is 75 percent African-American or Latino and 64 percent economically disadvantaged.
 
Today, Albany has nine public charter schools and three more planned.
 
When those schools started operating a decade ago, we began to see some interesting things happen: One of the public elementary schools that found itself situated in the middle of five nearby charter schools that require school uniforms ... began requiring uniforms.
 
We saw the first closure of a low-performing district school—one that happened to be situated across the street from the highest performing charter school. 
 
When parents and the school board saw that the charters were exceeding the district school day by two to three hours a day, they approved the first lengthening of the school day since the district was created in the mid-1970s.
 
And, most importantly, there was an overall rise in district elementary and middle-school test scores in recent years.
 
Given our focus on evidence, I want to be clear that correlation is not causation. But my sense is that district school leaders—who are no less dedicated to seeing their students achieve success—are seeing what works and emulating it, creating a sort of improvement through osmosis.
 
But improvement through osmosis comes slowly. We’d like to see the lessons of success applied more directly.
 
We’re starting to see a greater recognition that great schools can be learned from, regardless of district or charter.

For example, in my hometown, the Denver School of Science and Technology has been achieving great success for several years. They have received visits from education leaders from all over the world. But last year, for the first time, they received a visit from the Chief Academic Officer of the Denver Public School System.

In Stockton, California, four Aspire schools are ranked as the best performing in the district. So the superintendent simply chose to adopt one of Aspire’s teaching tools, called the “cycle of inquiry,” for the entire district.

In Houston, we’re seeing leaders from the ISD working more closely with leaders from KIPP.

Some charter leaders are being asked to bring their work back into the larger public school system directly, as we’re seeing with people like Lane Weiss—the principal of River Oaks Charter School in central California—who has been tapped by a school district in Silicon Valley that was looking for an innovative superintendent.

Or Jeannie Griffith, the principal of Benjamin Holt College Preparatory Academy in Stockton, California, who has joined the Oakland Unified School District to craft a blueprint for language arts for 55,000 students.

Or Larry Myatt, who went from Fenway College Middle School to oversee principal development for all of Boston’s secondary schools.

Examples like this are so important because, to achieve our goals, we will have to touch more schools and more lives than charters do today and can reasonably be expected to serve tomorrow—even if we eliminate caps and advocate for equal funding, which we support.

And I want to be clear: trying to travel the progress you’ve made to other public schools doesn’t diminish your work—it enhances it, by allowing you to drive the work of others. And that is real leverage.

Again, getting students graduated from high school college-ready is our shared goal, and evidence must be our only ideology in pursuing it. In that pursuit, we’re looking for good work, wherever it is found, and whatever the scale. We know that successful charter organizations grow from successful single independent charters.

And we know—as you do—that finding path-breaking success is not easy.

When the Gates Foundation started our work on high schools, we thought that if we could build a model of a high-achieving school, it would be replicated by other schools, and we could increase the number of students who graduated high school ready for college. We had a number of successes, some of which I’ve already mentioned and many of which are represented in this room.

However, in taking a hard look at our results, we found that you can’t dramatically increase college readiness by changing only the size and structure of a school.

The schools that made dramatic gains in achievement made the changes in design but also emphasized changes inside the classroom. They also put in place college-ready standards aligned with a rigorous curriculum. They developed the instructional tools to support it, hired effective teachers to teach it, and set up data systems to track the progress. This is what high-quality charters do so well, and our challenge is to help determine how to replicate and take to scale what works more broadly.

To that end, we’re now focusing our investments in the three key areas.

First, we’re putting more emphasis on what students need to be successful in postsecondary education. That means asking questions like: What are the best indicators for success in college? What are the methods, skills, knowledge, and materials required?

When we find what works, we want to put it in the hands of students and teachers.

Second, because teachers are the single most important factor in students learning outside of the home, we have to do more to make sure that they have the support they need.

To make sure we find and empower those amazing teachers who do help students achieve success, we are committing significant funding—for what we call District Partnerships for Effective Teaching.

These partnerships will allow us to look at what happens when you give teachers clear goals for excellence and measure and reward progress towards these goals.

We will be announcing these partnerships later this year.

Third, we want to innovate in a way that supports and engages students. This means holding every student to high expectations and giving them the support they need to meet them.

To support progress in each of these areas, we’re also making a commitment to data and advocacy.

I think about data this way. In professional baseball, when a player goes up from Single A to Double A, his manager knows exactly where that player is strong and what he needs to work on. It would be foolish not to tell his next manager that he “can’t hit the curve.”  But when kids move up a grade, their next teacher rarely knows if that student “can’t hit the sine curve.”

That’s why we need to look at the innovations many of you have made that allow teachers to make real-time assessments about the progress individual students—and entire classes—are making towards predetermined goals, and make them more broadly available.

Data is what lets us know if each student is on track to being college ready, and, if they’re not, it tells us what they need to get there.

As for advocacy, any success we achieve will be a light hid under a bushel, unless it helps create the hopefulness and urgency needed to take on the problems in public education in a systemic way.

This is true for you, too. The charter movement will only realize its full potential if the collection of proof points coalesces into a unified argument, and starts to influence the broader policy debate.

Advocacy is what allows it to go from proof that it can be done to a pathway for getting it done at scale. 

We will continue to partner with the charter community to advocate for eliminating caps and to push for more equal funding.

And I would add that nobody has helped lead that push more than the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and Nelson Smith. Thank you for your passion and your commitment.

Finally, we recognize that charters still face significant barriers to entry, chief among them, facilities costs.

We all know that attendance area schools have access to lots of cheap capital for facilities financing. Charter schools don’t. Market rates for loans are prohibitively expensive. And high-quality charters are seen—wrongly—as risky investments by the bond markets.

As a result, many charters end up operating out of storefronts and church basements and strip malls. 

That’s why we’re so excited to announce a new investment: its the creation of what we call a “program-related investment.” This initiative will help highly effective CMOs get the loans they need to keep growing by providing up to $50 million as a credit enhancement pool, which we hope will leverage dollars at a 10:1 ratio. In other words, this pool of money, which we’ll use as a guarantee, can help unlock over $500 million in charter school bond financing. This historic investment will give some of our best charter schools—the ones that have shown they can grow while maintaining strong results—the resources they need to serve even more students.

We expect this money to make a big impact in students’ lives. We also hope it sends a strong signal that high-quality charter schools are one of the best investments we can make in reducing inequities. We want to send a message to the markets, and the public at large, that an investment in charter schools is both safe and smart, and our hope is that this grant will allow several high-performing high-growth charters to scale their operations.