Closing the Skill Gap: New Options for Charter School Leadership Development

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June 2008
Christine Campbell, Brock J. Grubb

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With 400 new charter schools opening their doors each year and 4,000 charter schools up and running, a strong supply of leaders is crucial to the sustainability of charter schools.

But charter school leaders face a unique set of challenges, and traditional principal training programs, where the majority of charter leaders are currently trained, often leave them with a daunting skills gap.

In response, a new crop of 13 specialty training programs for charter school leaders has developed in recent years. The National Charter School Research Project surveyed those programs to learn how many leaders they train and what types of training they offer. In Closing the Skill Gap: New Options for Charter School Leadership Development, researchers Christine Campbell and Brock Grubb analyze program offerings in specialized charter leadership programs. They find that these new training options show promise in their responsiveness, course relevance, and methods of instruction, especially when compared to traditional leadership training programs.

The charter school leadership programs offer a very distinct approach to leadership preparation. Most strikingly, they are light on lecture, while heavy on real-world experience such as field observations, project- and task-based learning, and discussion. They also are more likely to cover some topics—such as personnel and labor relations, financial management, and academic accountability—that seem fundamental to effective leadership, not just for charter schools. Traditional leadership training programs should take note.

Still, the programs miss or treat too lightly some of the issues charter leaders struggle with most, including engaging parents, raising funds and managing finances, and negotiating with local school districts. To better assess the quality of these programs, the programs themselves need to collect and review more data on whether their graduates improve student achievement and school management.

What’s more, the specialty training programs are few and small in size. Together, the full-time programs in the study train only 100 new charter school leaders each year. In contrast, the need for training is much higher: every year, approximately 400 new charter schools open, and approximately 20% of existing charter schools—800 schools—will experience turnover within the next year.

The report concludes with strategies to address the challenges of building a strong charter school leadership pipeline, including expanding successful programs and popular professional development programs; tapping into local university public administration, nonprofit, and business leadership training programs; and expanding online training options.

The contents of this report were developed in part under a grant from the Department of Education (#U282N060007). However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal government. This research was also funded in part by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We thank them for their support but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented in this report are those of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Foundation.