The COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc on charter schools, and all schools, across the country. While the pandemic led to many students’ significant learning loss, it has also created a unique opportunity to reflect on how schools can best meet the needs of their students and leverage federal stimulus funds. The Learning Collective can help schools determine the best next steps forward.
Despite, and in some respects because of, the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was a very busy year for The Learning Collective. Our diverse clients and projects spanned ten states. We:
In an attempt to improve charter school authorizing nationally, The Learning Collective has been increasingly partnering with national charter school authorizing support organizations like NACSA and a number of state-level authorizers including Central Michigan University, Idaho Public Charter School Commission, Indiana Charter School Board, New York State Education Department, SUNY Charter Schools Institute and the Washington State Charter School Commission. Through this work a few things have become apparent.
The Learning Collective has evaluated 60 first- and second-year California charter schools through California Department of Education’s Public Charter Schools Grant Program. These are some of the findings from those visits.
2019 was a productive years for The Learning Collective. We led strategic planning projects with some new clients, such as Discovery Charter School and the Beginning with Children education network in New York, and with authorizers such as those through our partnership with Oklahoma Public School Resource Center.
TLC attended the nation’s first conference exclusively for independently run (i.e. not managed by a Charter Management Organization or Education Management Organization) charter schools – the 2017 Independent Charter School Symposium. It was also a pleasure to moderate the “Charter Authorization: Road to Greatness or Mediocrity?” on the role of authorizers in the charter school sector and whether authorizers are stifling innovation.
Here are some lessons learned, and ideas generated by, the thoughtful conversations and attendees:
Before Adam Aberman founded The Learning Collective, he launched and ran ICouldBe.org, an e-mentoring, career development, and college guidance system for low-income teens. Teens select their e-mentors, from around the country, with whom to work on 100% web-based projects over the course of an academic year. ICouldBe.org has served about 20,000 teens with about 10,000 online volunteers.
Learn more in a Vassar Quarterly article featuring Adam and his work.
The Learning Collective recently attended two annual conferences: NACSA / National Association of Charter School Authorizers and iNACOL / International Association for K-12 Online Learning. Keeping the list to just 10 proved too difficult so here are the top 20 takeaways from those conferences:
