Good morning, CharterFolk.
Today we’re pleased to present a Contributor Column from Andrew Broy, the President of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, and Board Member of CharterFolk.
We provide a bio for Andrew below.
Andrew 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 $180 million for charter school students.
Prior to joining INCS, Andrew was the Associate State Superintendent for the State of Georgia. 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, with a special emphasis on school finance disputes, desegregation cases, and charter school law.
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.
“Know What Business You’re In”: A Lesson for Charter Advocates
20 years ago, I was a litigator in an Atlanta law firm specializing in school finance lawsuits, school desegregation cases, and Voting Rights Act disputes. One October morning, I was invited to a luncheon hosted by the local Chamber of Commerce, which organized monthly leadership lunches designed to allow business leaders to interact with the Atlanta business community. That’s how I found myself on a warm fall day seated next to that day’s keynote speaker, Jeff Bezos.
The talk he gave that day was entitled, “Know what business you’re in.” Now, 20 years ago, Amazon was just beginning to shed its image as a massive book delivery service. And that same year Bezos launched Amazon Prime, much to the initial chagrin of his investors. When Bezos asked crowd what business they thought Amazon was in, he received a variety of related responses. A book delivery organization. An online department store. A competitor to big box stores.
Bezos waved off all these suggestions and replied simply, “We are a logistics and efficiency company.” What he was saying is that the future of Amazon was not found in simply delivering goods, it was establishing a logistics company that could deliver goods within hours, with no shipping or handling costs, at unrivaled prices. He was functionally saying that the era of waiting two to three weeks and paying exorbitant shipping and handling fees was over. And on the business efficiency side, very few people could envision what Amazon Web Services would become. His prediction seemed audacious at the time, but over time has proven to be prescient. And it contains a lesson for those of us committed to educational reform.
As an education reformer, I have thought of that speech often, asking myself what business I am in as the head of a state charter school association. Most of my colleagues, if pressed, would likely say we are in the policy business. Others might suggest that we are in the business of passing laws in state houses or securing more funding for charter schools. Still others would say we are in the business of establishing new schools for families without current access to high quality schools.
But after leading a state charter school association for many years, I have come to a different conclusion, one that might make some of my colleagues uncomfortable. While we do all of the activities listed above, at the most fundamental level, we are designing a new public education delivery model.
The old model—one that is overly bureaucratic, excessively political, provided by a single entity, largely unresponsive to parental preferences, and averse to accountability for student results—has proven itself incapable of addressing current challenges. These deficiencies were certainly highlighted during the COVID pandemic years, but their fundamental flaws have existed for decades. The recent NAEP results represent additional evidence that the insulated, single-provider model hasn’t worked for students.
In the wake of this frustration, many of us who personally witnessed the system’s deficiencies (I myself began my career as a high school teacher) turned to charter public schools. In turn, chartering became the single most prominent whole school reform model, proving its effectiveness in helping low-income students achieve transformational academic outcomes at scale. And that new model—based on enhanced parental choice, autonomy over school operations, governance by a local nonprofit insulated from the political pressures faced by local school boards, and accountable for student academic outcomes—has proven itself to be a better way to deliver public education.
I write this from Chicago, which is in the middle of a transition from a fully appointed board to a fully elected board over the course of four years. I have watched as this excessively political process has prioritized adult interests over student needs and made elections a focal point of the reform world. This is unfortunate because many of the gains achieved in Chicago were made possible by our consistent focus on strong principals, expanded high-quality school choice, and a transparent school evaluation system. Instead of supporting that proven legacy, last year we actually had a debate in Chicago about whether we should make academic results more transparent to parents. As if the opposite, more obfuscation and confusion, would somehow serve Chicago families.
Allow me to provide a concrete example. In 2017 the charter community came together with CPS leadership to design a universal enrollment system to make it easier for parents to navigate what had become a complicated choice system. The process was designed to lower barriers, create common application timelines across schools, make information about school quality more transparent, and give schools more certainty over likely enrollment targets. Critically, all high schools in the city agreed to participate in this new system.
This system worked very well for many years, until a new mayor was elected who appointed a board majority with a built-in antipathy toward using assessments to measure student learning growth and therefore school quality. The universal enrollment process initially featured each school’s summative ranking, which gave parents a clear measure of school quality. The result? Unsurprisingly, parents flocked to schools with higher quality rankings. Many of these were charter public schools, but not all. The system also identified high-performing district schools that had been overlooked for years.
Most important, it facilitated the migration of students to higher performing schools across the city, which in turn boosted performance broadly. Now that the summative ranking is gone (replaced by a much vaguer state system), parents are scrambling to make sense of an accountability system that even PhD-level statisticians would find bewildering. Based on this and related examples, one might rightly ask, what kind of business is CPS in? Certainly not one designed to empower parents to make decisions based on actual student performance.
A common refrain for advocates is that the degree of opposition one faces is proportional to the amount of progress one makes. By that measure, we are doing exceedingly well. But the story is still being written. And the outcome depends on a fundamental understanding of the business we are in and a dogged determination to preserve and further the academic gains we’ve experienced over the past 20 years of reform.