The good news to come out of the new study of Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) is that there is strong evidence that high quality public charter schools can be taken to scale. Several of these CMOs produce outcomes equivalent to three years of learning gains in just two academic years. The even better news is that the apparent drivers of these impressive performance gains are educational practices that the entire charter sector (and probably all schools) can put into practice.
There are two promising practices identified in the study: intense instructional coaching, particularly with new teachers, and the implementation of a culture of high expectations through comprehensive behavior policies. Broad application of these approaches could lead to more widespread academic quality, a true scaling of excellence. Importantly, these practices can be adopted without diminishing individual charter autonomy over curricular content or instructional strategies. In short, the practices associated with high performance in large CMOs don’t require a central office or multiple locations. Let’s take a closer look at the study, by Mathematica and the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). It examines nonprofit CMOs that had a minimum of four schools open in 2007, direct control over the decision to hire and fire school leaders (which excludes most KIPP schools), and served students who were not primarily dropouts or similar special populations. Forty CMOs with 292 schools met these criteria. For the achievement impact analysis, the sample was further decreased to 22 CMOs based on having schools with middle school grades and data to compare with traditional public schools. Some interesting findings:
The overall impact of CMOs on student achievement is positive, but not statistically significant.
On average, large CMOs made larger gains. The magnitude of the positive gains experienced by highest performing CMOs are great enough to overcome black-white and Hispanic-white NAEP achievement gaps.
The study found no evidence that CMOs focus on one subject area at the expense of another. Rather, CMOs that perform well in math also perform well in reading.
There is a positive relationship between math performance and a larger percentage of CMO teachers who are from Teach for America (TFA) or other teacher fellowship programs.
Compared with schools in traditional school districts, CMOs are less prescriptive in determining curriculum and instructional materials, log more instructional time (mostly through longer school days and more time on task), are more likely to hire teachers based on sample lessons and teacher commitment to the mission of the school, have larger applicant pools of teachers for each open position (63 vs. 20 applicants), are more likely to employ performance-based compensation, observe teachers and provide feedback more frequently, more often require teachers submit lesson plans for review, and use coaching and monitoring more often than “in-service” or workshop days for professional development.
States with higher scores on the components that lead to more autonomy in NAPCS’ model law have more CMOs.
This report provides lots to dig through, and there will certainly be a lot of discussion around this report. But the big takeaways are that a good number of CMOs are taking high quality education to scale, and there are common, high quality practices that can be implemented in more charter schools.
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