A report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington in Seattle, outlines how charter management organizations, or CMOs, create coherent school cultures.
The authors highlight three strategies used by CMOs: recruiting teachers who “fit” the school’s model or instructional strategies, providing “intensive and ongoing socialization” of teachers through coaching and professional development that reinforces the school’s goals, and aligning pay and career advancement to organizational goals and achievement rather than tenure.
The researchers did not try to link increased school coherence to greater school effectiveness in the report, which draws on information collected during a larger study of 10 CMOs conducted by the center with Mathematica, a Princeton, N.J.-based research group, that was released earlier this year.
