Frequently Asked Questions

A No. While experience and expertise in the classroom is helpful, there is so much more involved in designing and building a charter school of uncompromising excellence. Building Excellent Schools seeks candidates who have depth of experience in a variety of areas, including organizing, public policy, school administration, project management, and strategic planning.

The Fellowship focuses on areas — developing a practice-based educational program, building school support through community outreach and development, and founding a viable nonprofit organization — that represent the three essential components of a school founding process. Deep knowledge in each of these three disciplines is helpful, but it is also rare.

Successful Fellowship candidates typically have a breadth of experience in one discipline; the Fellowship’s curriculum provides support to round out their capacity in the other two. Building Excellent Schools seeks candidates with a variety of experiences because the Fellowship is as much about what Fellows can learn from each other as about what Fellows can learn from Building Excellent Schools staff and senior trainers.

AAll applicants to the Fellowship must submit an application on the Building Excellent Schools website.

AWe encourage all applicants to consider the 2012 Fellowship priority territories. For the 2012 Fellowship outstanding applicants may also apply to the Fellowship in urban territories other than priority territories as National Fellows. National Fellows are BES Fellows who are selected to found charter schools in territories that are not currently supported by BES. National Fellows are an extremely select group of leaders.

In addition to meeting the already rigorous criteria that all Fellows must meet in order to be selected for the Fellowship, National Fellows must also evidence that there are charters available in a their proposed urban territory and that they have the capacity to build community support for a new school. Applicants to become a BES National Fellow must complete the same Fellowship application.

ANo. Applicants to the BES Fellowship and BES Fellowship-National Fellows should not take meetings on behalf of your proposed school. Once selected, Building Excellent Schools will train and support new Fellows in building community support on behalf of your proposed school.

ANo. The Fellowship only supports Fellows who are interested in launching charter schools in the United States.

ANominations are an excellent way for us to discover great candidates for the Fellowship. Click here for more information.

AThe Fellowship’s one-year program runs from September through August.

AYes. The stipend allows Fellows to focus on the Fellowship as their sole professional engagement and to make a full-time commitment to the design and development of charter schools of excellence.

AThe Fellowship allows for the personal and professional needs of all Fellows. Approximately 85 days of training takes place in Boston at the Building Excellent Schools national office and all Fellows spend ample time in their respective communities building essential local support. Depending on the time of year and the Fellowship’s training requirements, Fellows can spend up to seventeen days per month in Boston.

ANo. The Fellowship is a national program that welcomes candidates from across the country. Currently, we are hosting Fellows from across the nation who travel to Boston for a series of on-site trainings and school visits.

AYes. Building Excellent Schools provides lodging at no cost to Fellows during Boston-based training days and to all Fellows in the event of required travel/training outside of Massachusetts. Accommodations in Boston are provided for Fellows who are starting schools in states other than Massachusetts. Fellows who are starting schools inside of Massachusetts will travel to Boston each designated training day.

ANo. Fellows are not employees of Building Excellent Schools and receive Form 1099 for the tax years into which the Fellowship falls.

AYes. Fellows have access to comprehensive health benefits through Building Excellent Schools’ support.

ATo encourage the sharing of best practices and products, the Fellowship’s model incorporates a mix of independent and group work. Each Fellow comes to the program with ideas about his/her school. They spend the duration of the Fellowship expanding upon and redeveloping these plans along the vision that is held by the proposed charter school’s founding group. In this way, the work of designing, building and launching a charter school of excellence is each Fellow’s unique endeavor.

Independent work presents each Fellow with a tailored program that helps fill in the gaps in her/his own learning, skill set or experience. As a group, Fellows pore over the curriculum, discuss and dissect its ideas and themes, participate in trainings and share their developing ideas and work. Fellows leave the program with an evolved school design and charter application that have been enhanced and strengthened by the input and critique of BES staff and their Fellowship peers.

AThe following are integral components of the Fellowship’s successful model: While Building Excellent Schools is dedicated to a distinct training model and set of core beliefs. The Fellowship does not simply provide training geared toward would-be school leaders or principals but it trains, coaches, mentors and supports individuals who want to build and found an urban charter school of uncompromising academic and managerial excellence – which requires a broader capacity range.

Our model includes a curriculum that is grounded in the best practices of the nation’s highest performing urban charter schools, numerous visits to those schools, ongoing interaction and discussion between Fellows and practitioners, a workshop model for sharing ideas and products, and a residency program.

All of these aspects in conjunction with individualized governance work and the Fellowship’s hands-on approach provide a supportive network within which Fellows can envision, design and build schools of excellence.

ABetween January and February, each Fellow is placed at a residency site most often in her/his home state or district for an apprenticeship in a high-performing operating charter school. Residency sites are chosen based on the strength of their academic and organizational records, their relevance to a Fellow’s school design plans, and their ability to embrace the skills and experiences a newly trained Fellow can offer.

Over the course of the residency, Fellows engage in the host schools as archaeological sites, completing projects that speak to their individual needs and skill sets, and their larger goal of developing an urban charter school of excellence.

AThe Fellowship year culminates with people and paper in hand, meaning that the Fellow has successfully built a board of directors and submitted a high quality charter application to the charter authorizer. During the latter part of the Fellowship year Fellows work to get their proposed schools authorized. Fellows move into a planning year upon authorization of their charter where they work to hire staff, secure a facility, build curriculum and enroll students. Upon charter approval, Fellows are eligible to apply for an external grant that supports their work during the planning year.

AAbsolutely. Building Excellent Schools provides support during the design, pre-operation and start-up phases of Fellows’ schools. This often manifests itself in a network of school assistance providers that offer a variety of short or long term services – e.g., business, management, and information system support; human resource evaluation and development; human service referral and coordination; real estate acquisition for expansion through a public real estate trust; etc.

An aspiring school founder’s participation in the Fellowship is just the beginning of a relationship that will last well into the proposed school’s operational years. Building Excellent Schools provides Fellows with ongoing access to resources, support and tactical assistance in a wide variety of areas through Follow-On Support. The support post-Fellowship focuses on implementation rather than theory, answering real-life concerns and needs related to strategic planning, fund development, board development, curriculum, evaluation and much more.

AA charter is an agreement that creates an entity and outlines its purposes and responsibilities. In the public education context, a school’s charter outlines its mission, educational plan, anticipated outcomes and the tools and methodologies it will use to assess its progress.

AA charter school is an independently managed, non-sectarian, tuition-free public school that is open to all students and accountable to the state or district that authorized it. Charter schools were created to provide public education choices for families, to encourage the competition that fuels innovation and change, to improve educational outcomes for students, and to promote academic and operational accountability for public schools.

Charter schools are free from many of the regulatory requirements of traditional public schools. In return, charter schools agree to meet the specific and detailed performance goals outlined in their charters. These goals must be met during the term of a school’s charter (typically 3-5 years) or the charter will be revoked and the school closed.

A Yes.

ACharter schools are public schools and, thus, are supported primarily with public funds. Based on a formula devised by the state or district in which it is chartered, a charter school receives a specific amount of funding for each child who attends the school. This “per pupil” amount reflects the average cost of educating a child in the public school district within which each student lives. Charter schools like all other public schools also have access to federal and state program funds if they meet specific criteria.

AYes. Any organization, group or individual can apply for permission to start a charter school.

ALearn more about the national charter school movement at The Center for Education Reform and The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.