Pub. 6 2016-2017 Issue 1

9 My request is that each school take a few minutes in one of your upcoming board meetings, and assemble a brief document describing several things. First, what successful innovations has your school adopted? How did you determine that they were successful? Second, what unsuccessful innovations has your school attempted? What did you hope these innovations would accomplish? How did those innovations not succeed? Sharing these less-than-ideal attempts may feel awkward, but it presents two very powerful learning opportunities: it can help schools avoid problems they’ve encountered, or it may spur schools to consider alternative ways of accomplishing the goals. Both of those outcomes are equally valuable. The third question I hope you will include in this document is this: how have those successes and lessons learned driven your decision-making in allocating SB 38’s equity funding? How are you measuring the impact these budget opportunities are giving your school? The Legislature understandably wants to know how the money they appropriated is improving student achievement. What are you doing more or better or new with these new revenues that is making your teachers more effective, your students better learners? To be clear, I am not asking for a lengthy document. I want a short, clear and concise document. My plan is to aggregate this information, so we can share the answers to these questions with the Legislature, the State Board of Education, the State Charter School Board, our friends in school districts and with the public. Unless your school gives me explicit permission, I will not associate specific practices or lessons with individual schools. But we do need to follow through on our promise to share new and innovative practices and methods of succeeding in the classroom. If I need more information about your school, I will follow up. I don’t want to create a heavy burden for you. Hopefully you have already conducted this analysis. On a regular basis, we all need to ask these kinds of questions, because we all need to make sure our schools are improving. We must improve whether we are already good or whether we struggle. The most fundamental promise we make to our parents, our teach- ers, our students and our elected officials is that we prepare students to succeed when they leave our schools. Utah charter schools must improve student outcomes. How you measure those outcomes will vary from school to school, but your students must be better prepared for the next phases in their lives because they came to your school. That is our promise, and we must deliver.