CharterFolk Contributor Andy Greenawalt – Playing the Long Game

Good day, CharterFolk.

Today we are pleased to share a Contributor Column from Andy Greenawalt, Board Member at Austin Achieve in Austin, Texas.

We provide a bio for Andy below.

Andy retired from Dell Computer Corporation in September 2000 after a successful 24-year career in information technology. He has since directed his efforts toward various personal projects, volunteer efforts and consulting. Primarily focused on education, he serves on two advisory councils at the University of Texas-Austin and one at his alma mater, Lehigh University, chairing two of them. He co-chairs an advisory task force for the UTeach program in the College of Natural Sciences at UT-Austin and is active with various nonprofits throughout the Austin area. While at Dell, Andy served for seven years in various capacities as IT vice president and Group CIO at Dell. From 1991 to 1993, he was vice president, Processing Services, at the Continuum Company (now CSC Financial Services). His IT career began in 1976 at Air Products and Chemicals in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he served 15 years in different IT and general management roles.

Playing the Long Game

If you ask a public charter school board member in Texas what our job is, most of us will give an acceptable answer. We are responsible for academic performance. We hire, supervise, and evaluate the CEO. We exercise financial oversight and safeguard public funds. We help establish policy and strategic direction, monitor enrollment, facilities, and organizational health.  We make sure our schools comply with our own charters and with state and federal law. Above all, we fulfill a fiduciary responsibility to the scholars and families our schools exist to serve.

That gives us a full plate. And if we do all those things well, we can reasonably say we’re doing our jobs as board members. But I believe this traditional list omits something important. Almost everything on it focus on the short or medium term: our academic performance, our finances, our facilities, etc. These are all critically important issues, but they share an assumption we rarely acknowledge: we assume public charter schools will continue to exist.

We can’t afford to make that assumption.

Public charter schools don’t operate in a vacuum. We operate in a political and regulatory environment that can shift dramatically. Legislatures can change funding formulas. Regulations can become more burdensome. Accountability and authorizing policies can be altered. Facilities funding can fail to keep pace with need. Growth can be restricted. Meanwhile, organized interests that oppose charter schools work hard to influence policymakers and public opinion. Many people who make decisions affecting our schools, ncluding some who are perfectly well-intentioned, simply don’t know much about us.

That creates a vulnerability that deserves the attention of charter school boards. We can have a terrific CEO, strong academic results, a balanced budget, clean audits, and full enrollment. But if the surrounding environment becomes hostile to charter schools, good governance by itself isn’t enough. Somebody has to play the long game.

Charter school boards have a responsibility to do exactly that. Our stewardship shouldn’t stop at making sure our individual schools are healthy from year to year. We should also think about whether the conditions will exist for our schools—and other public charter schools—to flourish five or ten years from now. That realization came to me through my experience at Austin Achieve Public Schools.

The Austin Achieve Story

John Armbrust founded Austin Achieve in 2011. We started with just 104 sixth-graders. Today, we serve approximately 3,300 scholars from Pre-K through 12th grade. I’ve had the privilege of playing a role throughout that entire journey. I was one of Austin Achieve’s founding board members and still serve on John’s board today.  

In those early days, we weren’t spending any time contemplating the future of the charter movement. We were building a school from scratch, and there was always something urgent demanding our attention: enrollment, facilities, transportation, budgets, academic performance, fundraising, etc. Then, being fortunate enough to experience some success, we discovered a new set of urgent problems associated with growth. There was never a shortage of challenges competing for our attention.

However, John recognized something early that I didn’t initially appreciate. Austin Achieve’s future wasn’t entirely in our hands. We could do everything right inside our organization and still be profoundly affected by decisions made outside it. Our long-term success depended partly on whether Texas continued to have an environment in which successful public charter schools could thrive.

So John got involved. He joined the board of the Texas Public Charter Schools Association and became increasingly active in the organization’s advocacy efforts. He also got some of our teachers and students involved in related grass-roots initiatives. Through John, I began to see the issue differently as well. I eventually joined the board of Charter Schools Now, the 501(c)(4) affiliate of  TPCSA. The more exposure I had to statewide charter issues, the more obvious something became to me: advocacy wasn’t a distraction from my responsibilities as an Austin Achieve board member. It was part of them.

Advocacy Isn’t Somebody Else’s Job

I suspect many charter board members instinctively think of advocacy as somebody else’s responsibility. The CEO handles it. TPCSA handles it. Somebody down at the Capitol handles it. Meanwhile, we’ll concentrate on governing our school.

That’s understandable, but it’s no longer acceptable. John and I began encouraging the Austin Achieve board to devote more attention to advocacy. We established a board Advocacy Committee, which I chair. The committee provides regular updates to the full board, helps members understand the issues affecting charter schools across Texas, and works to broaden board participation in advocacy activities. In other words, we began to play the long game.

Fortunately, this evolution at Austin Achieve has coincided with an increasing a state-wide emphasis on advocacy by TPCSA and Charter Schools Now. Partly due to my urging, TPCSA began to bring together charter school board members who have responsibility for advocacy on their boards. I became an initial member of TPCSA’s Board Advocacy Chair group. On behalf of TPCSA, Sarah Tredway organizes monthly calls that bring charter school board members from across Texas together to discuss advocacy, share experiences, and learn from each another.

Those conversations have been extremely useful because the questions we’re asking at Austin Achieve are also being asked elsewhere. How do we get board members more engaged? How do we build relationships with elected officials before we need something from them? How do we help policymakers understand what actually happens inside a charter school? How do we tell our stories more effectively? And how do hundreds of individual charter schools begin acting more like a movement rather than a group of independent organizations?

That’s where coordination has become powerful. TPCSA has increased its emphasis on advocacy at its annual conference, providing multiple sessions designed to help school leaders and board members become more effective advocates. At Austin Achieve, participation has grown as well. Kyle Clark and Christian Bell Onyemali have joined our Advocacy Committee, and Kyle now participates with me in the monthly TPCSA calls. That matters because advocacy can’t just be one board member’s pet project. If it is going to make a lasting difference, it has to become part of the board’s culture.

Making Advocacy Concrete

TPCSA has done something else that is especially helpful: it has made advocacy less abstract.  Its Advocacy Onboarding Checklist for Board Members identifies specific activities board members can undertake to become more engaged. TPCSA has also developed an Arc of Advocacy, laying out three tiered levels of activity for charter school board members. Together, these tools give boards an explicit path for moving from awareness to engagement and, ultimately, to more active leadership.

This is useful because the word advocacy can sound intimidating. Tell a new board member, “You need to become an advocate,” and the person may imagine testifying before a legislative committee next Tuesday. But that’s not where advocacy has to begin. It can begin simply by becoming informed: understanding the public-policy issues affecting your school, knowing who represents your scholars and families, and understanding how decisions made at the state or local level affect your funding, facilities, and ability to grow.

From there, your board members can begin building relationships. They can reach out to meet elected officials and other prominent local leaders, and invite them to your school to see teachers and scholars in action.  They can even facilitate contact with parents so officials can learn more about why they chose your school.  They can learn to tell your school’s story, and then keep telling it. Advocacy shouldn’t be something charter schools suddenly discover when a crisis arrives or a threatening bill appears in the Legislature. It should become a habit—a normal part of what responsible board members do. 

We Have a Good Story to Tell

One reason charter board members should be comfortable advocating is that we don’t have to manufacture a story. We already have a good one.

I love the Austin Achieve story. In 15 years we’ve grown from serving 104 to 3,300 scholars.  Behind those numbers are thousands of individual stories: parents who actively chose a school they believed was right for their child; teachers who devoted their careers to children; scholars who discovered they were capable of more than they thought; graduates who went on to college and careers; and families whose aspirations for their children are no longer constrained by their zip code. 

We can’t fully communicate those stories through a policy paper, a legislative briefing, or an email. That’s where board members can play a critical role. We’re volunteers. We serve because we believe in the mission.  And, we have relationships outside the school—with business leaders, philanthropists, civic organizations, and even elected officials. We can leverage those relationships to spread our stories and effect change in the surrounding environment.  We can influence that environment to become more accommodating to our schools.

Ultimately, the long-term future of charter schools won’t be secured by winning one legislative battle. It will be secured by building relationships, understanding, and trust over time. That’s what makes this a long game.

Playing Both Games

None of this means boards should spend less time on governance. Quite the opposite. If a charter school isn’t educating children effectively, isn’t financially sound, or isn’t operating responsibly, no amount of advocacy will help. Our first obligation remains running great schools.

But, the reverse is also true: we can’t simply run great schools and assume somebody else will make sure we’re allowed to keep doing it.

These aren’t competing responsibilities. They are complementary ones. Strong schools give advocacy credibility, while effective advocacy gives strong schools the opportunity to endure. That’s the change that has happened gradually on the Austin Achieve board. We still spend most of our time on the things you would expect—academics, finances, enrollment, etc. But advocacy has a seat at the table now as well.  

We have an Advocacy Committee. We participate in statewide conversations. We use the tools TPCSA has developed. We’re building relationships before we need them. And we’re learning to tell our story better. Most importantly, we’ve begun asking a different question—not just, “What does Austin Achieve need this year?” but also, “What do we need to do today to make sure schools like Austin Achieve can still thrive five or ten years from now?” 

Every charter school board should be asking some version of that question.

The scholars sitting in our classrooms today need us to pay attention to this year’s academic results, this year’s budget, this year’s facilities, and this year’s organizational challenges. That’s part of our job. But there is another group of children we should be thinking about too: the ones who haven’t arrived yet. The kindergartner who will walk through our doors five years from now. The sixth grader who will arrive ten years from now. The child whose parents haven’t even heard of our school yet, but who someday may desperately need the opportunity it provides.

Those children need something from today’s charter school board members too. They need us to make sure the doors are still open when they get here.  That’s why advocacy belongs in the boardroom. That’s why fulfilling today’s governance responsibilities isn’t quite enough. We have to do both.

We have to play the long game too.