Schools – Charter Management Organizations
Over the last 20 years, the charter school sector has demonstrated its capacity for creating new schools that meet the diverse needs of a broad cross-section of families and effectively serve students. These public schools are granted a short-term charter from an authorizer (often a state or county agency or a school 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.
Meanwhile, over the last decade and with NewSchools’ active support, a growing market of nonprofit charter school management organizations (CMOs) has demonstrated that successful charter schools can be taken to scale without sacrificing quality and has acted as a powerful research and development engine for innovative instructional practices, academic tools, and approaches to teacher preparation and support. However, there are still too few high-performing CMOs, and fewer still that have achieved the most crucial objective: closing the achievement gap – not just in terms of test scores and graduation rates but also in terms of college readiness, enrollment, and success.
Our goal in the NewSchools Innovation Fund is to create a national portfolio of CMOs that deliver these kinds of breakthrough results at large scale in low-income urban neighborhoods across the country. Together, these CMOs will serve as a compelling proof point, attracting the attention of communities and policymakers alike, thereby changing the public debate about what schools can accomplish.
In the NewSchools Innovation Fund, we will support growing CMOs capable of consistently achieving breakthrough results with the most underserved students. Some of these organizations will be high-performing CMOs – both inside and outside of NewSchools’ existing portfolio – that have already demonstrated success at scale, but need additional support to further elevate student achievement and extend their impact to more students and communities. Others will be new CMOs, such as high-performing single-site charter schools that aspire to scale their success or pursue innovative school and system designs that have the potential to propel student achievement to the next level of performance.