Charter Management Organizations
For more than a decade, charter schools have been an important innovation and a means for improving public education. These public schools are granted a short-term charter from an authorizer (often a state or county agency or a district); this charter allows them to operate independently from the district while still receiving public dollars and held to the same academic standards. In exchange for this flexibility – which liberates them from many of the restrictions that traditional public schools are bound by – they must demonstrate improved student achievement. If a charter school does not successfully serve its students, it can have its charter revoked and its doors closed.
Across the country, parents and communities have embraced this opportunity for new high-quality schools, such that the demand for them far exceeds the current supply. As such, NewSchools Venture Fund recognized the potential to create new systems of high-quality public charter schools in response to the need for increased scale, sustainability (financial as well as organizational), and consistent quality. In addition to providing much-needed educational opportunities for low-income and other traditionally underserved students, these charter school systems may also demonstrate effective alternative approaches to running a system of public schools – making them a powerful agent of systems change in public education.
NewSchools believes that charter management organizations (CMOs) – nonprofit networks of schools that serve a specific geographic area– are one of the most promising models for charter school scale. The CMO model is uniquely positioned to maximize quality and sustainability, while also leading to scale within a targeted geographic area. At their core, CMOs are designed to enable and accelerate charter growth with consistently high quality. By centralizing or sharing certain functions and resources across schools, CMOs offer the promise of greater efficiency and long-term sustainability – without indefinite philanthropic support. A common criticism of independent charter schools is that even if they succeed, their one-school-at-a-time approach does not offer a viable model or vehicle for wholesale reform of large public school systems. Successful CMOs demonstrate that educational quality at scale is possible, even in low-income communities.
NewSchools Fund III will broaden our existing network of CMOs and help our existing portfolio attain higher levels of student achievement and sustainable scale. In addition, we will explore new entrepreneurial approaches to turning around failing schools and managing diverse portfolios of schools.