CCAP and its partners, the Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers (CACSA) and the Florida Association of Charter School Authorizers (FACSA), have launched a new organization to support state-level initiatives working to strengthen the charter school authorizing practices of their local school districts.
The National Network for District Authorizing (NN4DA) offers a forum for sharing best practices in authorizing that can be tailored to each state’s charter school regulations to develop model materials for school districts and other local authorizers.
Nationwide, about half of charter schools are authorized by local school districts that often do not have staff dedicated to working with their charters. In an Op-ed article written for The 74, the executive directors of CCAP, CACSA and FACSA explained that through NN4DA, “state-based initiatives can reach more small districts, customize support to local needs and build peer-to-peer networks that bring more districts into the community of trusted professionals.”
NN4DA builds on the work of the Tri-State Alliance, a three-year federally funded initiative that developed a model for collaboration in designing resources and technical assistance strategies among the three state-level organizations. NN4DA hopes to bring initiatives in other states into the network to reach more local authorizers and is currently in discussions with authorizing professionals in several other states.
NN4DA’s work draws on national as well as state and local best practices, such as the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), but differs in its mission and strategy.
Rather than being a national association of authorizing professionals, NN4DA’s membership is made up of state-level authorizing initiatives and organizations that are each in the best position to reach and meet the needs of the individual authorizing districts in their states. CCAP and its partners believe that this approach has the greatest promise of improving authorizing throughout the country.
