Complete Coverage

Charter Operators Spell Out Barriers to 'Scaling Up'

Third-grade students Jasir Moore, center, and Shamarri Henry, right, confer on their first day of class at Achievement First Brownsville Elementary School in New York.

—Melanie Burford/Prime for Education Week

By Mary Ann Zehr

The pace at which the highest-performing charter-management organizations are “scaling up” is being determined largely by how rapidly they can develop and hire strong leaders and acquire physical space, and by the level of support they receive for growth from city or state policies, say leaders from some charter organizations viewed by advocates as having high student achievement.

To explore what might be obstacles to growth for successful charter operators, Education Week interviewed leaders of five of the seven charter-management organizations, or CMOs, in the NewSchools Venture Fund’s portfolio that the fund sees as producing the best student-achievement results.

The seven charter operators are: Aspire Public Schools , Achievement First , Green Dot Public Schools , Harlem Success Academy Charter School , the Knowledge Is Power Program , Uncommon Schools , and Rocketship Education . That same set of operators has also been identified by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington, in Seattle, as the nation’s top performers, and the center is expected to release a report in the fall about the characteristics that...