Education Week: Study Casts Doubt on Strength of Charter Managers

Education Week: Study Casts Doubt on Strength of Charter Managers:

"A report from Education Sector raises questions about the ability of charter schools and charter-management organizations to scale up as dramatically as their supporters might hope.

“The extraordinary demands of educating disadvantaged students to higher standards, the challenges of attracting the talent required to do that work, the burden of finding and financing facilities, and often aggressive opposition from the traditional public education system have made the trifecta of scale, quality, and financial sustainability hard to hit,” concludes the report, “Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools.”"

As hard-hitting as the findings seem to be, the report is at the center of a controversy over whether the final text—released by the Washington think tank on Nov. 24—was watered down.
The main author, Education Sector co-founder Thomas Toch, asked to have his name removed from the final product. It “didn’t fully reflect my sense of the current conditions or future prospects for CMOs,” he said in an interview. “Charter schools are an important addition to the public education landscape and the best CMOs have produced great results. ... But the CMO movement has created only a few hundred schools in a decade, and even with more funding it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much faster without compromising the quality of their schools.”

Under copyright rules, Mr. Toch is prohibited from publishing his earlier version of the two-year study, which draws on interviews with dozens of charter-network executives, visits to a dozen schools, charter-network business plans, and other documents. But Marc Dean Millot, an education industry observer and publisher, posted a June draft of the report online Nov. 30 in Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education blog.