Where To Grow?
Posted: August 2nd, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 12 Comments »
Charters are uneven in quality. Some are good. Some bad. If you’re good, you get requests to open in other cities.
Those opportunities are hard to sort out.
Pro: If you have a good model, you’d like to help reach more kids. So growth can sound like an idea that bolsters your mission.
Moreover, if you operate in more than one state, you may attract growth capital (because you’re a “national” story and can hit up national foundations), and you can diversify your political risk. That is, if you operate charter schools in just one state, a newly elected Governor can quickly make your work tough. Example: Rhode Island.
Con: To grow in other states has 3 additional challenges versus growing locally — different state academic standards, different operating rules, logistically much harder to visit all the schools. (The first issue may resolve itself if national standards indeed become reality).
Unclear: Does growth help quality (by allowing teachers/leaders in School A to learn from what seems to be working in School B)? Or hurt quality (by taking on too much, by diluting the talent level)?
Most good charter school operators worry most about this issue. They believe they need to improve their existing schools. Kids may be doing pretty good on state tests, but the teachers and leaders believe kids could do even better.
So if growth helps quality of existing schools, it’s worth considering. If growth dilutes quality a tiny bit, maybe even that is tolerable. The idea would be better to help 5,000 kids at 95% efficacy than 1,000 kids at 100% efficacy. There’s a utilitarian case for that. If growth dilutes quality a lot, though, it’s obviously a bad idea.
In our case, we’ve declined the chance to grow in places like NJ, NYC, St. Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, Indianapolis, etc. We’ve grown modestly in Boston.
Our growth instead tends to be with partnerships, whether districts or non-profits. We try to take our successes and failures (tend to be more of these, trial and error) — then share them in a concrete way that drives real change for real kids.
But in the big picture, I do think we’ll see more charter networks operate in multiple states. This raises a new question….
* * *
….If you’re a state education leader, and you’ve decided you want more charters for poorer kids, do you try to get more Mom-and-Pop start-ups? Or do you try to pull in more proven providers from other states?
If the latter, what’s your pitch?
Bryant Jones is a former Match Corps tutor. He now works for the RSD in Louisiana. It may be the only state in the nation systematically planning the charter sectors for its major metropolitan areas, not just New Orleans.
Here’s his pitch (pdf) to charter school operators on why they should consider starting schools in his state.
My main advice is they should change their state abbreviation from LA to LU. Everyone else in the world thinks LA means Los Angeles.
The political problems in RI are attributable to more than a change in governor and Board of Regents. Your underlying problem is the way suburban mayors wanting to get into the ed reform game have injected themselves into the process with the “mayoral academies.”
If you could just get a proposal together for an independent charter high school in Providence, it would be easy enough to get through, but I assume you don’t want to do that because of the labor protections associated with independent charters in RI.
So you want a mayoral academy probably. But now it has to be sponsored by a mayor, include multiple districts, probably have the charter held by those idiots at RIMA, etc.
Also, it isn’t the governor that extended the application process to over 18 months before opening the school (RIDE), or for that matter that has decided to recommend not renewing the charter of the third highest rated high school in Providence.
Your biggest political problem is that the local politicians threw in with Achievement First on a big proposal that is crowding everyone else out while not addressing local need. We could use some charter high schools, but we’re getting elementary schools instead, because it is easier and more convenient for the adults.
If RI reformers were interested in solving problems, a MATCH charter would have been first in their queue.
Love this topic! This is what I one day want to shift from teaching to working in (Any job leads??). For fun I once actually projected (as best as I could) the future 5 – 10 year growth plan of the larger CMOs (KIPP, Uncommon, Yes etc). I need to get a hobby or a girlfriend or both I think.
Having worked for/am working for KIPP/Rocketship respectively I have some insight into future growth plans. And most of this stuff is available online as well. KIPP projects to be 59,000 + students by 2015 and are well on their way to surpass that projection. Rocketship aims to be serving 1 million students by 2030 but in the near term will probably be serving 15,500 students by 2015. A few more near term projections: Yes Prep – 10,000. Achievement First – 13,000. Uncommon – 15,000. Idea – 15,000.
What I think is really interesting is how unambitious these goals are when looked at from 30,000 feet. Yes these schools and many “mom and pop” charters are doing great work in communities, but on a regional or national scale we still are seeing little movement in student achievement. Even if the CMOs above met their future stated goals their would still be millions stuck with the achievement gap. The good CMOs need to drastically increase their rate of growth if they want to solve this problem. This report from Public Impact:
http://www.publicimpact.com/going-exponential
really changed my view on if this is practical or not. Great read! It basically says that the top CMOs need to grow by 40% or more a year and by 2025 all children in poverty and affected by the achievement gap would then have access to a “great school”.
Now I don’t submit that charters are the “silver bullet” to the education problem (the report does make that case) but I do think it’s interesting that potentially the 40% growth rate of could potentially eliminate the achievement gap (long shot but possible). I just don’t think that people in the non-profit/educational world are cut out for growing at that rate. There seems even among the most innovative thinkers to be too many risk averse personalities. If Walmart had a choice between operating with a 50% margin with a customer base of 100,000 or of reaching 1,000,000 more customers but only operating at 10% margin what do you think they would choose? Yes quality has to be sacrificed at the altar of growth sometimes but the alternative (crappy schools and bad education) are much worse than an overall better than average school. At least one operator should be willing to give this a try…
In the immortal words of Tobias Funke “Let the great experiment begin!” and let’s go exponential.
Tom, good thoughts as always.
Joe, I think you’re right to include personalities. But I’m not sure risk-aversion is the ONLY issue. Feel free to push back here, but here’s what I see:
Some folks are motivated by a quest for excellence. Songwriters, carpenters, teachers, bakers. They love the craft. It’s only meaningful to them if they get to take the journey of trying to be excellent, even amazing, even perfect.
Of course frequently they don’t get there, but that’s what makes them tick.
I know sometimes — many times — our 3 schools fail to be excellent. But I derive great satisfaction from the general sense that our team legitimately vies for that. That’s not the same, I submit, as risk aversion.
Mike, your comment above makes me want to request a follow-up post…How to Grow. I ask because MATCH had a high school and then added a middle school, which seems to be pretty common. That is, realizing that it’s harder to help kids achieve at a high level the later you get them. We added elementary for that very purpose. Then, you added a separate school with a completely different grade span (K1-8). Now, you’re proposing a new model completely in a stand-alone middle school. Now, I know there are common threads in all of MATCH Education’s schools (namely, No Excuses culture and tutors), but why the diversity in models if excellence is the goal? Most CMOs go for replication…you guys certainly aren’t risk averse…
Hmm…that comment came out sounding more critical than intended. The correct tone should have been curious and impressed at your gumption. It’s too late and I’ve been wrangling with Dropbox too much this week.
MG, I agree that pursuit of excellence can be an end/is an end of itself instead of growth. I had not thought of that previously. But isn’t there also a moral obligation to grow? This would be where my Walmart analogy broke down, but if you (MATCH) have a model that currently achieves excellent educational results (as measured by standardized tests, college acceptance and matriculation and college graduation) isn’t there perhaps an ethical (internal or societal) demand/need to grow? Probably no one answer because as you said above growth “opportunities are hard to sort out”.
Mathteacher – I’ve always thought of MATCH as fulfilling a niche in the charter world. Almost as a laboratory where new ideas and innovations can be tried out and then scaled if successful (see Apollo 20, Great Oaks Charter etc). But Mike I’m stepping on your toes what do you think?
Joe,
Agree with you that MATCH often feels like a lab. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I was wondering if was intentional.
I think it will be interesting some day to do a history of the charter world. I feel like many or most charters, when starting up, were not looking to mimic each other, but rather to come up with a new model. Within the world of No Excuses schools, a lot of consensus has developed about certain things that work. So there seems to be a lot of replication of models. (For example, I don’t know that I could tell you the major differences between, say, KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon, but I could tell you a lot about philosophies they share.)
On your other point about scaling, I think there are a couple of issues. First, finding teachers who want to do the work and can do the work is exceptionally difficult and is exacerbated by burn out and high turnover. Second, finding qualified and willing leaders partially stems from the turnover rate, and partially because people who are considering leadership need to consider how they can do these rigorous jobs and be parents too (if that’s in their plans). Finally, there is the issue of charter caps and politics which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Paul,
1. Intentional.
2. Agree. It’s where I part ways with some of the more zealous charter advocates. Yes, there is no question we can “grow” No Excuses schools as they currently exist. Can we “scale” them given the sustainability of labor? Not if scale means a meaningfully large percentage of the nation’s 15 million poor kids.
3. Hence one aspect our effort with the Match Next design. I’m sure we’ll change a million things, but at least right now, I’m thinking of a school with a “hard cap” on teacher hours, to promote sustainability.
Ie, perhaps til 6pm weeknights, no weekends, no holidays. Perhaps even taking the laptop away.
Now to do that, we need to build a teacher job description “that works” — ie, if you take a great teacher, simply strip out planning in the name of sustainability, she’ll just quit b/c her satisfaction at 50 hours is too low. That’s one reason we need to find a way to use tech legitimately to save teacher labor.
@Joe Connor – I think CMOs run a huge danger expanding too rapidly. Once you start scaling, you come up against some new constraints that may significantly impinge on your ability to execute. Some of these have been mentioned by others–the main ones being availability of talent, leadership capacity, and regulatory environment. Right now, No Excuses schools collectively educate a very small percentage of the student population and are extraordinarily selective in hiring. They have also been very successful in attracting start-up funds. These are very favorable conditions. But once the contexts shifts, and you start: (1) hiring folks who aren’t quite as good, (2) admitting students whose families aren’t as active in choosing your school and model, (3) accepting new constraints in order to get new charters (i.e., weaker freedoms), you may find it much harder to execute as they have. I have a good friend who has done many charter school reviews and seen that many No Excuses schools in the same network often vary considerably in quality, even now. Also, as CMOs grow, the complexity of managing the organization grows quickly–keeping track of the different regulatory environments and what it takes to stay in compliance, maintaining relationships with key stakeholders and maintaining political support, supporting the diverse needs of individual sites and site leaders, etc.
A small personal anecdote, about two decades ago, I ran a successful small Summerbridge/Breakthrough enrichment program at a time when the model was quickly expanding nationally. We had a common application and held a sort of “teacher draft” each spring. My last year, I got a bit arrogant. I relaxed my hiring criteria and didn’t fight as hard to get the top people on my list, and let them go to other programs–mainly start-ups that needed strong staffs. I was trying to be collegial, and thought that the structures and culture I had in place were strong enough to assimilate a wider range of quality. What I thought was a minor change had a major impact on program quality.
I agree with Mike’s question about sustainability. No Excuses model relies on a potentially fragile human capital model which may have limits in terms of scalability. Match starting it’s own school of education has been a forward looking attempt to address this problem.
Ed, good stuff in there. Loved the story about Summerbridge.
One pushback is #2. Many No Excuses schools are admitting just 10% of their applicant pool, and since they’re randomly drawn, there’s no reason to expect that parents will differ in the “medium term.”
Great convo going here! I do want to push back on MG, Ed, and matchteacher though on lack of human capital being one of the biggest obstacles to CMO expansion. I think this is an issue, but I think it may be more of a human capital issue for leaders. Between TFA and other alternative teacher pathways I think there are enough teachers who fit the mold of young, hard working (60 + hours), and smart who could conceivably fit the future CMO’s needs. I think a lot of the CMOs don’t open new schools until they have an excellent leader (because the job is so demanding) and that might be more of what is slowing down expansion than lack of teachers. What do you think?
It’s mathteacher…as I don’t work at MATCH.
But in any case, the issue is that even if there is a pipeline of TFAers, they turnover so quickly (grad school, leaving teaching, getting promoted to fill all of the administrative positions, having families, choosing jobs with less hours) that it’s hard enough to staff even small expansions. This is especially true in hard to staff subjects like math, science, foreign language, etc.
When charter schools decide to expand, they don’t always have a leader in place. I don’t think they always wait around for the perfect person. At our school, I know a number of excellent people who thought they wanted to be leaders and then changed their minds when they hit late 20s-early 30s and realized they didn’t want all that stress during the early child-rearing years.
And even if people do choose to be leaders, they turn over quickly too. Caleb Dolan, of KIPP MA had a great post about that last year…