Recent
Report on Charter School Managers Offers Insights on What Works -- but
Downplays Disappointing Results
Study’s findings cannot
be applied charter schools overall, according to independent review
BOULDER, CO – A recent
study by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. and the Center on Reinventing Public
Education on the benefits stemming from private, nonprofit charter school
management operators highlighted interesting trends in the U.S. charter
movement, but overreached when
interpreting key findings, according to a review published by the National
Education Policy Center’s Think Twice review project.
Charter management organizations (CMOs) are nonprofit
firms that operate multiple charter schools either directly or through
management contracts. CMO-operated schools account for about one-fifth of the
nation's more than 5,000 public charter schools.
NEPC’s review praised the report for
offering an objective assessment of the comparative benefits for middle-school
teachers and students. But the review also noted that the report’s analytic approach
relied on a highly select slice of all CMOs operating nationwide, moving from
about 130 firms to just 22 that qualified for the study sample. The review
questioned the generalizability of the findings arising from these select CMOs,
and it criticized the report’s “tortured” attempts to find achievement
advantages in the CMO-run schools.
Professor Bruce Fuller of the University
of California-Berkeley reviewed the Mathematica/CRPE report, Charter-School Management Organizations:
Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts, for NEPC. Fuller has
studied the role of decentralization and market forces on education over the
past 25 years and is the author of the books Inside Charter Schools and Standardized
Childhood.
The growth of CMOs is an especially
timely topic, Fuller notes, in light of recent pushes by the Obama
Administration. The administration sees a prominent role for CMOs in school
turnaround efforts. It also has required, in order to qualify for federal aid,
that states lift caps on the number of charter schools.
Most CMOs, the report’s authors found,
serve urban students from low-income families. Survey data and site visits show
that CMO-operated schools are typically smaller; offer longer school days,
school years, or both; and recruit teachers who are loyal to their respective
school’s mission. The principals of CMO-run schools reported in surveys more frequent
coaching and mentoring of teachers and more intensive use of student test
results and other achievement data to evaluate teachers than did nearby
traditional public schools. The Fuller review found the report to be solid and
useful regarding these findings.
At the heart of the report is an impact
analysis focusing on middle school grades. The analysis began with the more
than 130 CMOs operating nationwide and then engaged in the successive narrowing
of the CMOs included in the study down to just 22 that met several inclusion
criteria.
From those 22, the report found that a
small number of CMOs boosted middle-school student achievement growth at
discernible levels. “Once thus narrowed, the study presents impressive results
for between 4 (reading outcome) and 7 (math outcome) of the 22 CMOs,” Fuller
observes. “So, to whom or what can we generalize these results?” Moreover, the overall
effects of CMOs on student achievement were largely flat when compared with
both traditional public schools and with a comparison sample of independent
charter schools not affiliated with a CMO.
“What’s disappointing for charter-school
adherents is the bottom line that the average effects of attending a CMO-run
charter school are not significantly different from those of attending a
regular public school,” Fuller notes. He criticizes the report for what he
calls its “unrelenting search for achievement effects in a small, selective
subset of sampled CMOs,” which he states “erodes its credibility.”
Fuller concludes that the report does
offer illuminating insights into features of successful CMOs that appear to
have a modest association with student achievement growth in middle school. “This
report gets us a bit closer toward pinpointing highly effective CMOs and the
practices or resources that may help to explain their efficacy,” he writes.
“What is not known is whether these practices or resources can be exported with
integrity to other charter companies or to the wider public school system.
These questions should be squarely addressed in future research.”
Find Bruce Fuller’s review on the NEPC
website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/
Find Charter-School
Management Organizations: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts on
the web at:
The Think Twice think tank review project
(http://thinktankreview.og) of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC)
provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically
sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC is housed at the University of
Colorado Boulder School of Education. The Think Twice think tank review project
is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for
Education Research and Practice.
The mission of
the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate
high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We
are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is
strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit
http://nepc.colorado.edu/.
This review is
also found on the GLC website at http://www.greatlakescenter.
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