Good day, CharterFolk.
Today were are delighted to share a great Contributor Column from Jana Wilcox Lavin, the CEO of Opportunity 180 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
We provide a bio for Jana below.
Throughout her career, Jana Wilcox Lavin has championed policies and practices that put student success at the forefront of decision-making. She has led Opportunity 180 since 2017, and prior to that, served as Superintendent-in-Residence of the Nevada State Achievement School District.
Before coming to Nevada, Jana served as both the Chief Program Officer for Scholar Academies and the Executive Director of Memphis Scholars. In that capacity, she designed, developed, and executed organization-wide strategic plans to turn around the lowest performing schools. She worked collaboratively with the community to improve student achievement, develop sound, student-focused policies, inform practices, and build resources for schools to drive outcomes.
Jana had previously served as Scholar Academies’ Chief Operating Officer where she led the organization’s strategy, operations and school launch teams, opening schools in Philadelphia, Washington, DC and Trenton, NJ. Her previous work also included managing a portfolio of non-profit programs supporting fundraising, strategic planning, program execution and organizational development, and the start-up of a consulting firm in Washington, DC designed to improve the connection between secondary education, higher education and the industry in support of various workforce and economic development initiatives. Jana is a graduate of The Hotchkiss School, Tulane University and Emerson College.
Let’s get straight to her post.
Charting a Course for Stronger Accountability for All Public Schools
At the beginning of a road trip, we open our GPS app of choice and enter our destination from our starting point, our blue pin (if you’re using my mapping app of choice). The destination appears as a red pin, a clear ending point that signals that we’ve reached our goal. What happens in the middle is up to the navigator. Do we take a road with fewer turns, less tolls? Highways or no highways? Along the way, we set up waypoints and pit stops for our accountability – do we need to stop for gas? Do we need a stretch break? Are we still using the most efficient route? Is there a roadblock that wasn’t there before that we need to account for? The choices are (for the most part) many, and it is up to each of us to decide how we get there.
At Opportunity 180 …
… we take a whole-community approach to addressing Nevada’s most pressing education issues, including accountability for lagging student performance. Our North Star – every kid graduating from high school college and career-ready – guides our work of navigating the line between our “blue dot” of where we are, and our “red dot” of increased student achievement, more kids graduating ready for their next step, and every kid having the opportunity to attend a school that fits their needs, no matter where they live. As we venture through that route between those two pins on the map, how do we account for and mitigate those inevitable challenges and roadblocks as they appear?
Charter schools are uniquely positioned to be paradigms of how accountability can work in public education, and Nevada is no exception. The charter school sector offers lessons and best practices in accountability for public education in entirety. There are systems in place to mitigate those challenges – frameworks for operational, financial, and academic performance, with specific, set targets for each school based on their individual goals, in recognition of every school and every student journey being different. There are safeguards in place if those challenges occur – notices of concern, intervention on a state level, community and board engagement, and yes – sometimes, even closures.
Change and accountability involve difficult conversations and actions, as well as planning for additional infrastructure in our education system to ensure a robust accountability framework and mitigation strategies that address student performance effectively and efficiently. In Nevada, charter school performance frameworks have recently been updated …
… to reflect changes in the sector, best practices, and lessons learned. And some of those lessons have been learned under a very public, scrutinous eye: two Las Vegas-based schools closed this summer …
… after multiple Notices of Concern, state intervention through their authorizing body, and significant remediation plans.
While the closures are unfortunate, accountability systems with our state authorizer worked as intended. Had these schools been part of one Nevada’s 17 county-wide school districts, there would have been no recourse, short-term or long-term, leaving kids to bear the impact of an education that didn’t serve them. In the school district setting, the roadblocks may never have gone up, leaving people stranded by the side of the road when they could have taken a different route.
Did it cause disruption along the way?
Yes.
Was it for the best?
Yes.
Can every education stakeholder – from students to parents to school board members to state legislators and anyone with a stake in the outcomes of our public education system – learn something from those closures?
You bet.
Charter schools can demonstrate why accountability is critical, no matter what school or district a student attends, and why it is a challenge we shouldn’t shy away from – rather, it is a concept we should define, embrace, and rally around as we collectively look to improve student outcomes and ensure our public education system is delivering results for all kids. As the charter sector in Nevada continues to grow, the accountability systems built in can strengthen both the charter sector and the greater public education space, providing real-time lessons learned and best practices to other school systems and leaders, and giving us an opportunity to plan and when necessary, re-route, to get us to our destination.
In Nevada, charter schools have recently seen gains in policy and infrastructure to support their journey in serving students: Nevada Governor Lombardo’s education omnibus bill during our last legislative session yielded a two-year pilot program for charter school transportation …
… and the ability for municipalities to authorize charter schools.
The Nevada Facilities Fund was introduced in October 2023 to address the challenges charters face in acquiring adequate facilities for their schools, in one of the largest bipartisan, public-private partnerships in the state’s history.
And, our state government passed a historic $2.6 billion increase in education funding per-pupil funding increase in 2023.
There’s a long way to go for charter school parity, but Nevada is a state ripe for growth in the sector, and these are solid steps forward in providing support and infrastructure for success.
With that historic funding increase, however, are calls for increased accountability. A recent Edunomics study shows that despite spending approximately $12,000 per pupil (including ESSER funds), fourth grade reading scores not only fell during the pandemic, but continued to fall, even with post-pandemic investments. Math scores only saw modest gains with recovery investments.
If we don’t set clear bars for achievement and don’t have the clarity around the end point on our GPS, then the journey – and the resources required of it – are less effective.
We can devise the targets and the metrics, roll out dashboards, and route policy around getting to these targets. These steps are all important to realizing where we need to be, and the best way to get there. To close the loop, we – as stakeholders in our public education system – need to ask the question, “Where do we go from here?” If a school or a district fails to meet those targets, what supports should they receive? What recourse do parents have? What interventions should take place, and at what intervals? How do we effectively re-route to ensure kids are learning and leaving school prepared for their next step?
Charters in our state can demonstrate how accountability can lead to growth and improved results for every school and every student participating in our public education system. We can demonstrate that accountability isn’t a hazy concept in the distance; it is providing the guardrails to get us to our destination.