A new study examining the organizational practices and educational effectiveness of charter management organizations (CMOs) reveals a wide range of positive and negative effects on student achievement in charter schools. While the most successful CMOs in the sample dramatically raised student achievement levels, others showed significantly negative impacts.
The report from Mathematica Policy Research and the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) highlights a range of organizational models and educational strategies that produced achievement effects that were more often positive than negative, but that varied substantially within the CMO sample.
CMOs are nonprofit organizations that operate multiple charter schools either directly or through management contracts. There are 130 CMOs across the United States that account for about one-fifth of the nation's more than 5,000 public charter schools. During the last decade, CMOs have been a significant factor in the growth of public charter schools, especially in major urban centers.
The Mathematica/CRPE report examines management and instructional practices from 40 CMOs, as well as achievement impacts for charter school students affiliated with 22 CMOs that had four or more middle schools opened by 2007. The study does not include data from for-profit education management organizations.
"CMOs are an important part of the education landscape and a subject of significant national attention," said Joshua Haimson, a senior researcher at Mathematica. "Among the CMOs for which we were able to assess academic impact, many are having a strong positive effect, but some underperform relative to nearby public schools. Our findings on promising practices can inform efforts to improve school performance and substantially close student achievement gaps."
In looking at academic impact, as measured by state assessments, the average achievement effect was positive, but the average impact also was determined not to be statistically significant. Impact estimates for individual CMOs were more often positive than negative, but the average impacts masked a wide variation throughout the entire sample, researchers said. For example, two years after students enrolled in the 22 CMOs covered by the analysis, 11 showed significantly positive impacts in math, while seven demonstrated significantly negative impacts. In reading, 10 of the 22 CMOs had significantly positive impacts, while six had significantly negative impacts.
On the positive side, math impacts at the high end of the scale were substantially larger than any other impacts, positive or negative. The math impacts in the highest-performing CMOs were potentially large enough to amount to three years of learning gains in just two years of enrollment. Effects of this size could substantially narrow racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, researchers said.
In contrast, the lowest-performing CMOs were significantly underperforming relative to nearby district schools, and their students were falling substantially behind within two years after enrolling.
“We need to replicate what’s working within these high performers to ensure that all students can thrive in a high-quality public school. At the same time, we must also as a movement acknowledge that there is a small subset of CMOs that are not serving their students well," said Ursula Wright, interim president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in reaction to the report. "It is important that we take these results seriously and encourage charter authorizers, and the rest of the charter school community, to take steps to ensure that all public charter schools are meeting their intended promise.”
Among other student achievement findings, CMOs with positive impacts in one subject tended to have positive impacts in other disciplines, including science and social studies, not just in math and reading. In addition, Hispanic students tended to benefit the most, showing larger two-year math and reading impacts than other student subgroups for nine of the CMOs that researchers determined had sufficient data. Also of interest, larger CMOs tended to demonstrate greater academic gains than smaller organizations, suggesting best practices are scalable and replicable across a CMO charter school network.
From an organizational and management standpoint, the report shows CMOs use a wide range of strategies and practices, but some patterns are evident. Among those, CMOs in the study typically had much smaller schools than local district schools, as well as slightly smaller class sizes. They also provided more instructional time than host districts, often through extended school days, longer school years and summer school programs. CMOs were less likely than school districts to prescribe a particular curriculum for all the schools in their network but were more likely to provide intensive coaching for teachers. To that end, CMO schools also were more likely to implement school-wide behavior policies and pay teachers based on performance.
The Mathematica/CRPE study also sought to determine what practices correlated with positive academic impacts. Among a set of six practices investigated by researchers, positive achievement impacts among CMOs appeared to be linked to clear expectations for student behavior, including a school-wide behavior policy and signed agreements with students and/or parents, as well as intensive coaching and monitoring of teachers. Other staffing practices studied were not associated with positive impacts, researchers said.
Further research on the impact of CMOs is ongoing. By early next year, researchers involved in the Mathematica/CRPE study said they would follow the current report with an examination of CMO strategies and impacts at the high school level, going beyond test scores to examine longer-term impacts on high school graduation and college enrollment.
The full report, Charter-School Management Organizations: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts, can be downloaded here.
