Originally published by This Week in Education.
Amistad Academy is a bright shining star in public school reform. Founded in 1999 in a renovated warehouse in a blighted New Haven, Connecticut, neighborhood by a group of Yale law school students, the 289-student charter school has won the praise of two federal education secretaries. Educators throughout the country have traveled to the middle school to study its success with students who have endured the ravages of urban poverty—arguably the nation’s toughest educational challenge. And Amistad’s strong academic performance has led the school’s founders to create a non-profit organization called Achievement First that is attempting to build a network of 30 charters schools like Amistad in three Connecticut cities and Brooklyn, New York.
But keeping Amistad’s doors open hasn’t been easy. Over a quarter of the school’s annual revenue—nearly $1.4 million, or $4,200 per student in 2008-09—comes from private donations rather than public funding. To generate these heavy yearly subsidies, Amistad relies on an ambitious fundraising network led by two well-connected New Havenites who have served on the board of trustees of elite local private schools like Hopkins Grammar and Choate Rosemary Hall, and who have helped ensure that Amistad’s many visitors include a steady stream of well-heeled donors from Greenwich, New Canaan, Westport, and other affluent Connecticut enclaves.
Amistad and Achievement First are part of an ambitious movement in American education to educate large numbers of impoverished inner-city students to higher standards than public schools traditionally have sought for them. Over the past decade,nearly four dozen new, nonprofit organizations with names like Aspire Public Schools, Uncommon Schools, and, perhaps the best known, the Knowledge is Power Program—KIPP—have set to work alongside Achievement First to replicate the nation’s best urban charter schools, the publicly funded but independently operated schools that emerged on the reform landscape in the early 1990s. Together, they represent an unprecedented campaign to take school reform to scale.
This education Manhattan Project has been propelled by the nation’s best and brightest, a new generation of social entrepreneurs with Harvard business degrees and Rhodes scholarships on their resumes who are committed to helping disadvantaged students by building a new, performance-driven brand of public schooling.
Some of the new education entrepreneurs have turned to building charter school networks in pursuit of a solution to the slow pace of improvement in traditional public schools and in response to the uninspired performance of many of the nation’s individual charter schools. They’ve sought to create “proof points,” evidence that large numbers of disadvantaged students can achieve at sharply higher levels than most do now.
Others have sought to use charter management organizations, or CMOs, as they’re called, to create a “FedEx effect” in education, putting enough competitive pressure on traditional public school systems to cause them to embrace reforms, the same way that the rise of FedEx led the U.S Postal Service to start Express Mail delivery and other services. In some cases, they’ve envisioned charter school systems replacing traditional public schools outright, serving as engines of “creative destruction.”
To many, the new education entrepreneurs represent the future of school reform. They have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropy from new and wealthy foundations. And the boards of directors of many charter management organizations and their individual schools are stocked with lawyers, investment bankers, and corporate executives, the sorts of rich and powerful people usually associated with prestigiousprivate schools.
They have been drawn to the strong performance of some CMO schools in overcoming the educational consequences of poverty. Major independent studies of student achievement in these networks of charter schools are just now getting underway. And some researchers have found higher attrition levels among the organizations’ weaker students (by law, charter schools must be open to all students and use a lottery if oversubscribed).
But a number of charter networks, including Achievement First, have produced impressive early results. It is a performance with potentially powerful social consequences and one that has won many CMOs congratulatory coverage in the national media—on 60 Minutes and the Oprah Winfrey Show, in the New York Times Magazine and Esquire, in nearly every major daily newspaper, and in a spate of new books—and the strong prospect of a substantial federal investment in the organizations’ expansion by the Obama administration.
But behind the flattering headlines is a different story. Interviews with dozens of executives at leading charter networks and a wide range of other experts, travel to over a dozen schools run by the most prominent charter organizations in four states, and a reading of thousands of pages of business plans, consultant reports, and other documents provide a portrait of financially fragile organizations struggling to sustain the quality of their schools as they expand.
The uncompromising commitment of leading charter networks to success with the nation’s toughest students stands in sharp relief to the performance of many traditional urban school bureaucracies. They have demonstrated that disadvantaged students can be educated to higher levels than most are today, and the best of them have been laboratories of reform, teaching valuable lessons about what’s needed to successfully educate children living in urban poverty. They have attracted some of the nation’s best talent and most influential leaders to public education, a sector that has long lacked status in American life. They have improved the education of thousands of students. And now, with the President of the United States and the U.S. Secretary of Education praising their work and pledging to fund their growth, they are about to move to the center of the national education stage.
But in the decade since the emergence of the first charter management organizations charter networks have expanded more slowly, produced fewer truly outstanding schools, and required more resources than they had hoped. The extraordinary demands of educating disadvantaged students to higher standards, the challenges of attracting the talent required to do that work, the burden of finding and financing facilities, and often aggressive opposition from the traditional public education system have made the trifecta of scale, quality, and financial sustainability hard to hit.
The critics of traditional public schools should be as chastened as they are inspired by the record of charter networks. With some 95,000 students, charter management organizations today educate about 1 percent of the nation’s 8 million disadvantaged urban students.
Their roughly 320 schools have not all achieved Armistad’s academic success. Nor have they yet catalyzed widespread reform among the nation’s 95,000 traditional public schools. And now the organizations and the foundations that have sustained them are being battered by the global recession, pushing some CMOs to the brink of insolvency.
The experience of leading charter management organizations suggests that merely devolving authority to charter school leaders and holding them accountable for results—an approach advocated by many early charter proponents—is an insufficient reform strategy. The charter networks that have produced the best results over the past decade have spent many more resources supporting their schools than most of them had anticipated—and more resources than many traditional public school systems spend on their students today.
Even with an infusion of new federal funding it won’t be easy to expand the supply of truly high quality public schools for students living in urban poverty at a significantly faster pace, the record of leading charter management organizations suggests. CMOs face significant state and local regulatory hurdles. Many charter networks today lack the capacity—the school leaders, the administrative expertise, the qualified teachers—to scale their organizations rapidly without sacrificing quality. And the long-term financial viability of a number of leading charter management organizations is unclear in the absence of continuing subsidies by foundations and other sources—given the substantial cost of educating students to significantly higher standards that traditional urban public schools and the fact that many charter networks must work with lower public funding that traditional public schools and finance their facilities.
Ultimately, the best way to sustain high-performing charter networks both educationally and financially and to leverage their successes would be to give traditional school systems strong financial incentives to embrace CMOs without diminishing the networks’ autonomy and to make charter networks part of comprehensive strategies for countering the impact of poverty on learning in urban centers.. It is tremendously difficult, the experience of the leading charter networks makes clear, for schools to push impoverished students to high standards while trying to address, by themselves, the myriad problems that their students bring with them through the school house door.