Title: Aspire Public Schools: From 10 Schools to 6 Million Kids | Bridgespan
Headings: Aspire Public Schools: From 10 Schools to 6 Million Kids
Aspire Public Schools: From 10 Schools to 6 Million Kids
Summary
Key Questions
Setting the Strategy
Defining the Organization’s Theory of Change
Finding the Right Scale for Change
Exhibit A: Aspire’s Theory of Change
Exhibit B: Aspire’s rank among districts serving over 70 percent F/RL students [8]
Reality Checking the Answer
Exhibit C: Decision Tree for Going to Los Angeles
Reality Checking the Answer
Determining the Staffing Required to Deliver the Strategy
Exhibit D: Exhibit D: Advocacy staffing example
Determining Who Works Where
Planning for Financial Sustainability
Making Changes and Moving Forward
Notes

Content: Among Aspire’s leadership, there were two competing theories for how this change would occur. Some members of the team wanted to concentrate Aspire schools in a single district. This approach (dubbed the “competitive approach”) relied on market-based competitive pressure to drive change. As Aspire schools drew students away from the existing public schools, the financial pressure from the accompanying loss of per-pupil revenue would, they reasoned, force the district to adopt new practices to retain students. Others on the team believed that the organization should spread schools across a broad geographic area, to show that the model worked in a variety of environments. This approach (named the “cooperative approach”) hinged on using the successes of Aspire schools to encourage districts to adopt similar practices and establishing statewide policies that required them to do so. Charters simply had not been around long enough to allow Aspire’s leadership to decide definitively between the competitive and cooperative approaches. But they did know that if they took too many students from a given district, it was likely to fight back. Districts historically had responded to large-scale encroachment by making critical services for charter schools very expensive or threatening to revoke the schools’ charters. If the charters withstood these threats, over time they could push the district to change—but that would be a long and difficult road to travel.