This post is intended to elaborate on a quote of your editor in the August 6 issue of the New York Sun by reporter Elizabeth Green on the Charter Management Organization (CMO) idea: 

"I would call it a fool's errand.... You really can't control quality. This isn't like hamburgers."

Here's how your editor came to that conclusion:

Your editor joined NewAmerican Schools (NAS) in 1996 to coordinate implementation of the plan he had helped to develop at RAND to take the non-profit school reform incubator's eight "whole school" models to national scale by charging public schools for the service, and to change the entities that developed those models from "design teams" to professional service organizations.

As some of you may know, NAS was founded by some of this country's best known firms - Xerox, Boeing, Bell South, the NFL, Goodrich, etc., etc., and the board was made up of their CEOs.  Your editor concluded his first presentation to the board as a NAS employee - a discussion of scale-up challenges, particularly the problem of uneven implementation leading to a set of poor performing schools - with a request that these board members make some of their staff available to provide technical support on the challenge of "quality at scale" (a term that became one of his mantras).

Instead of the usual immediate offers of support,  Lou Gerstner of IBM made one simple statement: "Quality has to be built into the product."

Since that board meeting had not resulted in consulting support, your editor went out and hired a two-man team of professors from Virginia Tech - one from the business school with a focus on organizational change in business, the other a former superintendent from the education school's principal training program. Their job was to get a baseline on how our eight "design teams" were then going through the process of "finding partner schools", carrying out their implementation of the design in those schools, and monitoring implementation and outcomes, and suggest improvements.

Your editor found the study quite useful on many levels, but the rest of NAS and the teams did not share his views. In retrospect, what the Virginia Tech team said was a variation on Gerstner's comments. They saw many ways to improve implementation, but the educational impact was likely to be small and the cost substantial. The only point where our teams were really "in control" was when they decided who to work with. After that point, they were largely stuck with the partner. The consultants' advice was to get much smarter about "client selection." 

This was not what our teams wanted to hear in 1997 when they were having a hard time finding any partners, let alone ideal ones. They wanted insights on how to make the best of the customer base they had. The teams were hoping to achieve uniformly high quality outcomes by controlling what they thought were the inputs to quality - and in so doing they pretty much followed the critique of traditional school districts' failure to achieve uniformly high school performance. 

There's a saying in Washington - nothing fails like success. In other quarters it's known as the "Peter principle" - rising to one's highest level of incompetence. The teams had controlled the inputs to quality outcome in their original sites. They saw no reason why they could not scale control. That proved to be an error. The following is a post hoc assessment, from a chapter your editor wrote for a RAND study on scaling up education programs, downloadable below:

The small-group process of identifying problems, solving them, and then integrating the new knowledge through participation and apprenticeship is an informal yet efficient system of quality control. It works reasonably well as long as implementation staff work in close proximity and in the same schools, meet regularly as a team, add staff from a fairly well-defined and even well-known pool of applicants, and train staff through a close mentor-apprentice relationship.
 
As too many schools are added for most staffers to appreciate the situation in each school, as staff members are dispersed to serve a geographically distributed network in ways that make regular formal and informal meetings difficult and far less frequent, as the leadership runs out of people they know to fill new positions, and as the number of new staff members outnumbers the veterans, these informal systems simply disappear or disintegrate. Unless they are deliberately replaced with formal systems in anticipation of this collapse, quality will suffer—often dramatically.

What your editor has learned since is that these systems are too expensive to build and maintain - and so no one has really built them.  But even more important is the fact that few if any organizations would know what to build. Quality control requires that both the outcome and the process by which that outcome can be produced be specified with precision. Fast food chains can do this.  Hospitals and law firms cannot.  Schools are more like the latter than the former. Hence your editor's comment in the Sun that schools don't produce hamburgers.

The following is from the same chapter in the RAND study:

The assessment of a program’s readiness for the market starts with an appreciation of two structural factors. The first is recognition that all but the simplest of programs are packages of interventions in the practice of teaching and learning, together with some appreciation for how each of intervention contributes to changes in practice.  At the start, it seems that few developers understand or can really describe their programs as much more than the proverbial “black box”; the mechanism by which their program achieves its results is dimly understood....
 
Second is an appreciation that every program is conveyed by some medium and that there is an array of media to choose from.  People can help a school implement the program, or developers could rely on printed matter, videos, or tape recordings. Invariably, because publications and other materials alone have proven insufficient for quality implementation, there is a mix. The people chosen can be senior or junior, staff or consultants. Work can be done at the school  site; school staff can be taken off site; and, increasingly, schools can have access to rich multimedia experiences online. Teachers can be trained individually, with other teachers of students of about the  same age or students who are studying similar subjects, with other teachers from throughout their schools, or with teachers from other schools, other districts, or other states. Use can be made of “800” number phone lines, online help desks, and online or printed  responses to frequently asked questions. As with interventions, few developers understand or can explain the cost-benefit assessments that led to the particular mix of media that constitute the program when it first goes to market.....

An appreciation of these two structural aspects of a program is important because few programs will work exactly the same way in the first paying schools as they did in the development sites or as they will in the next schools that will eventually populate the network..... At least as important, an appreciation of the somewhat arbitrary nature of the original mix ensures that the model developer will be prepared to modify the program when necessary. My experience suggests that the need for modification will come both early and often.

Your editor's experience is that too much of every k-12 program developer's visions exists in his or her mind, is subjective rather than objective, something that people know when they see it, and only see when they share the same values and culture. This is especially true when the model is as all encompassing as the notion of "school." The vision cannot be achieved by controlling what people do after they've joined the organization, it can only be achieved by working with people who share the vision - i.e., by good client selection up front.
During his tenure at NAS, your editor was a voracious reader of anything with "venture" in the title, and with the internet boom in full expansion, there was a lot. One story stuck (but not the citation); by a venture capitalist who explained that for a long time he had felt obliged to focus more attention on his most marginal investments. Not one of his ventures tanked, but in retrospect he decided it had been the wrong strategy. Why? Because the time spent on his losers was time not spent on several promising firms that could have been real winners. Again, the article highlighted the importance of initial selection, and the human difficulty of conducting triage on the portfolio post facto.

Finally, some years later, your editor managed to snag a substantial commitment of pro bono consulting work from The Parthenon Group.  By now the NAS teams hads gone through several cycles of finding and working with new clients, and come away with a better understanding of costs and operating patterns etc. Among many other things, Parthenon attached costs to the work processes the Viginia Tech team had examined. The work showed that teams were spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to find and sign up one partner, and that poor selections costs much more in subsequent implementation than good ones. The teams' finally accepted the idea, and although they still believed they would have to take sub-optimal clients, they slowly positioned themselves to make that less likely.

So when the subject matter is something as complex as a school, the idea that a central organization can control the inputs required for quality is a fools' errand. Central doesnt know how its program for superior outcomes actually produces outcomes and so can't specify a system of quality checks that will achieve it, the conditions that led to success in the first schools will not be replicated in many others, and the shared vision of of quality cannot be rapidly spread to new employees or parents.

If you want quality at scale, the single most important factor selecting the right partners, and most organizaqtions are so hell-bent on growth that their primary criteria for partnership is the other party's willingness to sign some agreement. After the right selection process and criteria, If you want to improve the chances of uniformly high quality from a network, you are more likely to get it with: a compelling vision that approaches a religious calling  (KIPP for example, which makes near-monastic demands of its staff), stays withing a very narrowly defined geographic and demographic space (see Green Dot in Los Angeles - but not its extension to NYC), have a very large network of colleagues who share your vision staff selection (the old EMO LearnNow, acquired by Edison), and subject new employees to the kind of mentoring and transfer experiences most likely to develop a single corporate culture.

For more on CMOs, listen to the six-part podcast series "What Has Become of the Charter Idea?" starting here. Each podcast runs about 7 minutes and can be heard without an ipod right from your current computer.