Good morning, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share a new Contributor Column from Andrew Broy, the President of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, and Board Member at CharterFolk.
We provide a bio for Andrew below:
Andrew is an advocate. He serves as President of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools (INCS), a statewide advocacy and charter school support organization serving 145 charter campuses in Illinois that collectively educate more than 65,000 public school students. In his years leading INCS, Andrew has tripled the annual revenue of the organization, helped add 75 charter public schools to the statewide count, launched three associated political and electoral entities, and enacted numerous bills into law.
For instance, INCS served as lead sponsor of several major policy wins, including a 2024 law that extended state transportation funding to charter schools and a 2022 law that established Illinois’ first ever statewide per pupil facilities fund for all charter public schools. These wins come on the heels of several other substantial legislative victories over the years, including a new charter funding formula that guarantees equal operational funding to Illinois charter students; a law extending the permissible charter renewal term to ten years for high-performing charter schools; and a provision that tripled the funding available in the state revolving loan program. The operational funding win alone led to an annual, recurring funding increase of $120 million for charter school students.
Prior to joining INCS, Andrew was the Associate State Superintendent for the State of Georgia. As Associate State Superintendent, Andrew supervised the Policy, External Affairs, and Charter School Divisions for the Department and served as the Department’s principal legislative liaison, working in collaboration with the General Assembly, the State’s multiple educational agencies, and the Governor’s office.
An attorney by training, Andrew was a civil rights litigator in the Education, Civil Rights and Government practice in the Atlanta office of Sutherland. While at Sutherland, Andrew represented clients in a wide variety of litigation matters in state and federal courts, including civil rights, employment litigation, and class action litigation, with a special emphasis on school finance disputes, desegregation cases, and charter school law. In addition, Andrew has authored several amici briefs in United States Supreme Court cases, including cases challenging congressional authority to enact remedial civil rights statutes, a case involving the constitutionality of federal campaign finance reform, and a case involving the constitutional sufficiency of the military tribunals designed to try individuals designated as enemy combatants.
Andrew is a frequent lecturer and presenter at national conferences involving education law and charter policy. Andrew serves on a number of local and national boards and began his career as a high school teacher. Andrew is an avid angler and the proud father of three amazing daughters, Simone, Noelle, and Malia.
Charter Governance: True Innovation
I have served many roles within the charter movement over the past 20 years: board member, bill drafter, state authorizer, and founding attorney. I currently serve as the head of the state charter school association in Illinois, the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, and run our associated political entities that engage in state and city elections. In these roles, one reality has become abundantly clear—when it comes to charter success, governance matters.
When reformers discuss charter innovation, they typically discuss alternative school models, modern approaches to curriculum, implementation of a longer school day or year, a focus on college access, enrollment, and completion, or some other school-based form of innovation. While these are certainly important, I think an even more important ingredient of charter innovation is overlooked: charter governance, which represents a huge contribution the movement has made to education reform more broadly.
Nowhere is that lesson more aptly demonstrated than in the recent governance turmoil engulfing the Chicago Public Schools. For those not watching closely, allow me a quick summary. Chicago is transitioning to a fully elected, 21-member school board after decades of having a mayoral-appointed school board. Our current mayor, who worked as a Chicago Teachers Union organizer for many of his formative years, has attempted to force through a union contract favorable to his former employers before the elected school board took their seats on January 15. To do this, he pressured current Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez to take out a short-term, high interest $300 million loan to afford the union’s excessive demands, which included a request for substantial pay raises and an attempt to shorten the school day for students.
That’s right, while most of us in the charter school movement are obsessively committed to helping our students recover from the learning gains suffered during the COVID-related school closures and their aftermath, our local labor union in Chicago is advocating to shorten the school day. CEO Martinez wisely rebuffed this request and was subsequently fired by the outgoing mayoral-appointed school board on the Friday evening before the holiday break. He has subsequently filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop the board from negotiating the union contract without his participation. He won round one.
What does all this drama have to do with charter innovation? Charter schools operate under a contract with an authorizer that essentially delegates the authority of running the school operation to a nonprofit governing board. This provides crucial independence from the elected school board and, equally important, provides for leadership stability that is a prerequisite to excellence. Contrast this with leadership at the Chicago Public Schools, where I have worked with seven different CPS CEOs in the past decade. Chicago is not an outlier in this regard. The average tenure of a superintendent in large, diverse urban districts is between two and three years, demonstrating that urban school governance is often simply a revolving door of leadership without any consistent focus on what matters for students. Every new superintendent comes in with new priorities and a new focus. This inevitably leads to a round of new reforms that are unlikely to last long enough to see meaningful gains. Couple that with the reality of working within a challenging political environment and you get a recipe for stagnation, or worse, substantial academic regression.
Compare that with the nonprofit governance model embraced by the charter school movement in which a nonprofit governing board manages a network of charter schools. Such a focus leads to stability, consistent leadership, and a higher likelihood of transformational results for young people. Consider the case of Greg White, the current CEO of a network of charter schools in Chicago, Northern Illinois, and Washington DC called the LEARN network. Starting from a single school on the West Side of Chicago in 2001, LEARN now has 11 schools across the state and one campus in Washington DC serving more than 4,000 students from Pre-K through 8th grade. What has enabled this consistent, sustained growth? Greg has been in his position for more than 18 years and has embraced a laser focus on adding great schools helmed by capable leaders, resulting in remarkable success with low-income students. Every LEARN campus outperforms its neighborhood and zoned public schools. LEARN alumni graduate college at 2x the rate of their peers exceeding city, state and national averages, and their college graduation rate is 8 points above the national average for all students regardless of socio-economic status or ethnicity.
These extraordinary results were made possible by consistent leadership and a determination to do what’s right to meet the needs of students. That requires long-term planning, not 2-year cycles of leadership focused on external posturing and political expediency. And therein lies the current lesson of Chicago. Governance structure matters.
This is borne out in academic data, as the charter governance model has delivered remarkable results for Chicago children. Charter public schools currently educate 25% of the high school students across the city and, as demonstrated by a recent Stanford University study, are producing dramatically better outcomes for their student population. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) found that the instructional impact of Illinois charter schools on student learning was determined to be the equivalent of 40 additional school days for reading and 48 additional school days for math. The study also found that high-performing charter school networks, like LEARN, are delivering even more impressive results for low-income and minority students, recognizing these networks as “gap-busting” schools. According to CREDO, LEARN’s instructional impact for students is the equivalent of an additional 71 days in math and 76 days in reading. At the high school level, Noble Schools, Chicago’s largest CMO which operates 18 campuses across the city, increased instructional impact by an additional 168 days in math and 86 days in reading.
This is not to suggest that charter governance is a guarantee of strong performance. Our member schools face the same challenges as other public schools face in serving students from neighborhoods challenged by disinvestment and violence. But it is to say that the charter governing model, which is unique in public schooling across the country, is more likely to result in transformational schools for students. And that is well worth fighting for.