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Over the past twenty years charter schools have increased, and while it is still unknown if charter schools have better results than conventional public schools, one research finding is evident and that is the results of charter schools vary among the different schools. Many people such as educators, policymakers, and potential funders want to know the secrets of successful charter schools and pass the secrets on to other charter and public schools.
Charter school management organizations (CMOs) are responsible for a number of different charter schools. One of the goals of each CMO is to bring high performance of particular schools to scale so more schools can have positive effects. Research on the role of CMOs, done by Mathematica Policy Research and the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), can be found in the report, National Study of CMO Effectiveness. The research had the financial backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and NewSchools Venture Fund.
There were three primary research questions:
- Characteristics and Context. How quickly are CMOs growing? Which students and areas do they serve and what resources do they use? What are the practices and structures of CMOs? What state policies and other factors appear to influence the location and growth of CMOs?
- Impacts. What are the impacts of CMOs on student outcomes and to what extent do these impacts vary across CMOs?
- Promising Practices. Which CMO practices and structures are positively associated with impacts?
The study focuses on CMOs that are nonprofit and work with four or more schools. To be eligible for the study the schools also needed to qualify in four ways:
- Have four schools open by fall 2007,
- be nonprofit since inception,
- not primarily serve dropouts or similar special populations, and
- directly manage schools
Findings
- CMO-run schools now represent a substantial share of charter schools and are concentrated in certain states and urban areas. 80% of all CMO-run schools are in Texas, California, Arizona, and Ohio. These states also offer a high level of autonomy to charter operators. 74% of CMO-run schools are in cities.
- Relative to their host districts, CMOs serve a disproportionately large number of black, Hispanic, and low-income students but fewer special needs students.
- Per-pupil expenditures in CMOs vary widely, along with public funding formulas.
- On average, CMOs’ schools tend to be much smaller than schools in their host district, with marginally lower student-teacher ratios.
CMO Practices
- CMOs are less likely than districts to prescribe a particular curriculum or student behavior policy, but CMO principals report more often than district principals that they implement a school-wide behavior strategy.
- Relative to districts, CMO principals report that their teachers receive more coaching and that their teachers’ pay is more likely to be based on performance.
- CMOs can be categorized into four clusters that are differentiated largely by their emphasis on school wide behavior policies, teacher coaching, instructional time, formative assessment use, and performance based compensation.
CMO Impacts on Student Achievement
- Test scores impact estimates for the average CMO after two to three years in middle school are positive in all four subjects, but they are not statistically significant.
- Achievement impacts for individual CMOs are more often positive than negative, but vary substantially in both directions.
- CMOs that produce positive impacts in one subject tend to produce positive impacts in other subjects, including science, social studies, reading, and math.
- In several CMOs, math and reading test score impacts are larger for Hispanic students than for other students.
- In several CMOs, math and reading test score impacts are larger for Hispanic students than for other students.
Practices Associated with Positive Impacts
- Comprehensive behavior policies in schools are associated with larger CMO impacts.
- CMOs with intensive coaching of teachers tend to have larger positive impacts on student achievement
- Several other notable CMO-level characteristics do not show significant relationship with impacts
Questions for Further Research
- To what extent do CMOs produce positive effects on other student outcomes aside from academic achievement as measured by test scores?
- Might some CMOs have selected the wrong models to replicate or had difficulty replicating promising school models?
- Which promising strategies should CMOs implement and how should they implement them?
- To what extent are some CMOs able to consistently improve student outcomes across their schools?
- Are new CMOs using the same strategies and producing the same impacts as the established CMOs in our study?
- What other factors might contribute to CMO impacts?
