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Charter Management Organizations

To date, NewSchools has made portfolio-level investments in 17 charter management organizations (CMOs) across the country.

Scale: These school managers currently operate 154 high-quality schools and touch the lives of 54,130 students across the country. The demand for these schools far outstrips their capacity: in the 2007-2008 school year, there were 2.5 applications for every available seats in these schools. As such, these CMOs plan to continue growing. Over the next several years, the organizations we support will run more than 200 charter schools and serve nearly 75,000 students - making NewSchools' national portfolio comparable in scale to a mid-sized urban district.

Quality: Even more important than the scale of our CMOs' operations is the quality of the education they are providing to their students. The highest value of a venture philanthropy organization is developing and scaling organizations that achieve true breakthrough results. Breakthrough results change the game by proving what is possible and offering practices that can be adopted across the traditional education system. The NewSchools portfolio has achieved that:

• In the 2007-2008 school year, five of NewSchools’ charter management organizations (CMOs) representing 55 schools outperformed their host districts by more than 20 points in at least one subject (reading or math), and one CMO representing 11 schools outperformed their host districts by more than 35 points in both subjects.

• A small but growing number of schools within portfolio CMOs have entirely closed the achievement gap in both reading and math, meeting or exceeding the average performance of non low income students in their states.

• The vast majority our CMOs substantially outperformed their district peers. This success was most significant among underserved populations. Throughout the portfolio, African-American and Latino students outperform their district counterparts by double-digit margins.

• The ultimate goal for these schools is to provide students with an education that prepares them for success in college and beyond. Schools in the NewSchools portfolio reported very promising data on enrollment of students in 2- or 4-year colleges, with an average enrollment rate in of 96%.