April 16, 2025
By Kelly Wynveen, a senior project manager on WestEd’s School Choice team. Wynveen has more than 10 years of experience working in education and has led projects that support state and regional education leaders in addressing federal compliance issues, revising accountability systems, supporting high-quality charter school authorization, and conducting authentic community engagement.
Charter school performance frameworks, used by authorizers across the country to determine how schools are assessed, can influence everything from enrollment numbers to funding and even whether the school can remain open. With such high stakes, updates need to be made regularly. When it was time for the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority (SPCSA) to update its academic, financial, and organizational performance frameworks, they went beyond those routine updates, approaching it instead as an opportunity to reshape the future of over 80 charter campuses serving more than 60,000 students.
The goal was clear: Create a more accurate, fair, and effective accountability system that reflects the complex needs of Nevada’s schools and community perspectives. With funding from the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), Opportunity 180 (the state’s charter support organization), and the SPCSA partnered with WestEd to meet this ambitious goal.
Frameworks That Reflect What Matters to Schools and Communities
The academic, financial, and organizational frameworks used to evaluate charter schools in Nevada had been in place since 2019. Although the overall purpose and goals remained, there were several areas within each framework that the organizations knew needed updates, including revision of components of the academic framework to measure the performance of specific student groups, and some financial indicators that no longer reflected the financial reality of charter schools in the state.
To do this work effectively, the SPCSA and Opportunity 180, with funding from Opportunity 180’s federal CSP grant, needed to ensure that the voices of educational leaders across the state were incorporated to create performance frameworks that accurately measured what matters to schools and communities.
The SPCSA wanted to use the updated frameworks during the 2024–25 school year, which meant that the work needed to be completed and approved by the SPCSA board in the summer of 2024. Over the course of 4 months in 2024, WestEd worked with SPCSA staff to understand the Nevada charter context and developed a plan to ensure that a variety of perspectives and opinions would be considered.
Leading With Inquiry to Inform Decision-Making
The WestEd team began by making efforts to ensure that a wide variety of voices were heard, including those who would be impacted by the frameworks the most—charter schools themselves. This feedback would be paired with other opinions from educational leaders across the state.
The team facilitated several focus groups for Nevada charter school leaders to share feedback on what was and was not working with the current frameworks and engaged several other educational leaders from the Nevada Department of Education, the Charter School Association of Nevada, and other charter support providers.
After analyzing this feedback, crosswalking the framework indicators with national best practices, and tailoring the frameworks to align with the Nevada statute and educational code, the WestEd team presented recommended changes to all interest holders through a second round of interviews and focus groups with charter leaders across the state to ensure that the recommended changes captured what was needed.
WestEd’s gathering and analyzing of feedback was crucial for creating frameworks reflective of Nevada’s charter school communities.
“The amount of feedback groups [WestEd has] been able to hold has been incredible,” said Melissa Mackedon, SPCSA Executive Director. “It’s been a great partnership, and we appreciate their expertise.”
In June 2024, the SPCSA board approved the final updated academic, financial, and organizational performance frameworks to be used in the 2024–25 school year. The changes made to the frameworks reflected the needs and desired changes of over 60 Nevada charter school leaders, over a dozen SPCSA staff members, and four other organizations in the state, who all provided feedback, which included adding new indicators to the academic performance framework.
Although the opinions of these interest holders differed, the final product reflected careful considerations of what was needed to fulfill Nevada’s legal requirements and ensure that the SPCSA had the right tools to ensure that all students attending charter schools in Nevada had access to high-quality education.
To learn more about this work and how you can partner with WestEd to update and create sustained impact through strengthening your charter authorizing practices, contact Kelly Wynveen, Senior Project Manager on WestEd’s School Choice team.