National Public Charter Schools Commitment to Quality

In May 2015, the FCSA, along with charter school advocates across the country, pledged our commitment to quality.

The current education system in America is not preparing all students for the future demands of college, career, and the global economy. This is a challenge facing all communities as student needs become more complex and achievement gaps persist. The system is particularly broken for low-income students, providing them fewer opportunities and producing weaker results. Standing in strong contrast to these systemic failures, public charter schools are beacons of hope for millions of families across our nation. Despite hundreds of proof points across the country—many coming to scale—too few high-performing educational choices are available to families.

We, the undersigned organizations, have a unique opportunity to contribute to the policy direction of the public charter school movement. To be effective stewards of the movement, our top priority must be to ensure that public charter schools are high-performing, fiscally responsible options accessible to all families. That means we must be committed to the continued growth of our best examples, to seeding the next generation of innovative schools, and to the closure or reconstitution of schools unable to meet student needs.

Collectively, we agree that:

  • The public charter school movement’s principal goal is to create autonomous, publicly accountable, high-performing public schools for students;
  • The long-term ability of the public charter school movement to offer high-performing public schools to those who need them most rests, to a large degree, on the quality of the schools created within the movement;
  • Many communities lack enough high-performing public school options to serve all students;
    The continued operation of persistently underperforming public schools is a failure for children; and
  • All parties with advocacy and stewardship responsibilities for the movement should deliberately work to increase the number of high-performing public charter schools and reduce the number of underperforming public charter schools.

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