Unlocking the Secrets of High-Performing Charters: Tight Management and "No Excuses"

Charter schools are approaching the ripe old age of 20. Although more work remains if we are to fully understand this complex education reform "movement," a growing body of data and research is being compiled about its strengths, weaknesses, and impact. An important subset of the charter school sector is just now receiving a similar level of scrutiny. Charter management organizations (CMOs) are integrated networks of charter schools that came on the scene around the turn of the century, a little less than 10 years after the first charter school opened its doors. According to a recent study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, by 2008 CMOs accounted for more than 10 percent of the charter school market and had been the beneficiaries of at least $500 million in private philanthropy. At this scale, CMOs warrant a close look to improve our understanding of what they are, how they operate and perform, and whether they offer an adequate return on public and private investment. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit grant-making organization, has been for more than a decade one of the leading private hinders of CMOs serving low-income urban neighborhoods. Along the way, we have amassed data and direct experience that provide a window into this world. Our analysis suggests that most of the CMOs in our "portfolio" are outperforming the local districts, especially for low-income students. Nevertheless, there is significant variation across our sample. The highest-performing CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio tend to be those that have embraced a "no excuses" approach to teaching and learning. These CMOs have created organizational and school cultures based on explicit expectations for both academic achievement and behavior, with meaningful consequences when those high expectations are not met. Creating a New Market In 1999, NewSchools Venture Fund made its first grant to University Public Schools, an emerging charter school network founded by Don Shalvey and Reed Hastings in California that would soon be renamed Aspire Public Schools. Supported by follow-on investments from NewSchools and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Aspire became the nation's first nonprofit charter management organization. Since then, NewSchools has helped launch and grow many more CMOs, mostly in California, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Working alongside NewSchools have been national funders like the Walton Family Foundation, the Fisher Fund, the Robertson Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Charter School Growth Fund (see "The S500 Million Question," forum, Winter 2011). These and a variety of locally based investors, notably the Robin Hood Foundation in New York and the Renaissance Schools Fund in Chicago, have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into developing an entirely new sector of public education. What's a CMO? Unlike EMOs (education management organizations), their somewhat older cousins, CMOs are not-for-profit. Their nonprofit status has at least three advantages: access to philanthropic capital, greater mission alignment, and diminished political resistance. And, unlike more loosely organized school networks, CMOs manage their schools directly, either under contract to a school board of trustees or under a fully integrated governance structure (in states where single charter school boards can operate multiple schools or campuses). Under such arrangements, a CMO has effective authority to hire and fire a school's leadership team and to establish most of the educational and operational systems in each of its schools. Most CMOs are organized much like a typical school district, at least on paper. There are centralized functions, including executive leadership and several operations teams, which provide certain administrative, financial, and educational support services to each school in the network. …