Charter-Management Organizations: Expansion, Survival, and Impact

By Thomas Toch

In the decade since they emerged on the education landscape, nonprofit networks of charter schools called charter-management organizations, or CMOs, have built some of the biggest brands in education—the Knowledge Is Power Program, Aspire, Green Dot Public Schools, Uncommon Schools—and won plaudits from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times Magazine , and “60 Minutes.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is now poised to give them a central role in the federal government’s multibillion-dollar school reform campaign. He has named leaders of the CMO movement to key posts in his department and has pledged to make “big bets” on the highest-performing charter networks with the expectation that they’ll produce large numbers of outstanding new schools for disadvantaged students.

But the research for a report on CMOs that I’ve produced for the think tank Education Sector reveals that many of these organizations are going to be hard-pressed to deliver the many schools that Duncan wants from them. Discussions with dozens of CMO executives and other experts, an examination of CMO business plans, consultant reports, and other documents, and visits to over a dozen schools run by prominent CMOs in different parts of the country make clear that a host of challenges—the need to find and finance school buildings, the expense of educating impoverished students successfully, the difficulty of recruiting high-performing teachers and principals, and, in many instances, strong opposition from traditional public educators—has left many CMOs working hard to sustain...