We just got back to Texas from Chicago after attending the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference. What a great reminder of the amazing work going on across the country – and of what an important role we’re playing here in the Lone Star state. We had many charter leaders attending from Texas and several TCSA members participating in conference breakout sessions to share their best practices with the other 4000+ attendees. Texas was highlighted by both Bill Gates and Secretary Duncan who held up KIPP and YES Prep as shining examples of charters leading their students to incredible levels of success. What a pleasure to represent such a great group of schools doing such amazing things for the students of Texas!

While I never tire of hearing how extraordinary Texas is, it was also inspiring to see firsthand so many like-minded colleagues from across America tackling similar tough issues that we face here. Innovation and Quality were the focus areas of the conference, two things we take seriously here in Texas. While we have both in large supply, we don’t have a monopoly, and it was terrific to hear the work others are doing. We learned about other states’ quality initiatives, data analysis practices, member services, dropout recovery success measures, and so much more. All of us at TCSA took away countless ideas that we can incorporate into our practices to accelerate our impact for on the charter movement.

The 2011 conference will be in Atlanta and I believe Texas can play an even bigger role next year. Imagine the best practices and success stories we’ll be ready to share by then!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Quality Framework. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.