The National Charter School Research Project, part of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, just released Quantity Counts: The Growth of Charter School Management Organizations. The report is based largely on a series on interviews conducted by project staffers Lydia Rainey and Guillermo Maldonado with senior managers in Education Management and Charter Management Organizations, bolstered by reporting and reports on these organizations.  Your editor used these interviews to write the first draft of much of the main report (chapters 1-3), which was edited by Director Paul Hill and Associate Director Robin Lake, who also wrote the front matter, conclusions and recommendations.

Your editor's favorite paragraph concerns the paradox of efforts to obtain consistently high quality through centralization:

A centralized MO (Management Organization) approach to replicating schools brings its own challenges, many of which can combine to work against consistent quality, such as pressure to “make” business plans by growing quickly. Such pressures have led MOs to undisciplined approaches to deciding with whom and where they would start new schools, as well as to inadequate investment in startup and support infrastructure. These compromises can be costly both in terms of finances and academic results.

Too many MOs have repeated avoidable mistakes. Naïve assumptions about growth goals, design fidelity, politics, and community relations have exacerbated already challenging scale efforts. EMOs and CMOs alike have encountered these problems. Only regionally focused and independently financed for-profit designs have achieved both consistent quality and relatively large scale. It is too early to know the record on academic outcomes and financial sustainability across CMOs of more than 20 schools, but there is certainly little rigorous evidence yet of a large scale CMO (more than 30 schools) with consistently high-quality and stable schools.

Anyone interested in the problem of scaling up any kind of school improvement activity ought to read the report, for the same reason ship's captains read other mariners' logs before embarking on a voyage. The least painful "lessons learned" are gleaned from another's "mistakes made." This report presents a comprehensive list of both.