For Hire Or Charter

AIA-FL Blog ^ | July 8, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

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For Hire or Charter

Bethany Stotts, July 8, 2010

In their interim report on a National Study of Charter Management Organization Effectiveness, Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education contrast charter management organizations (CMOs) with coexisting public school districts and explain how the leaders of the former have considerable latitude in terms of hiring, firing and other institutional practices.

“In contrast to typical school districts in which school leaders frequently complain about the lack of flexibility in allocating school resources, well over one-third of surveyed CMOs (41 percent) allow their schools to determine the number of teaching positions needed and in which areas, and to allocate teachers to those positions without CMO input,” write the authors.

CMOs, as defined by the authors, are nonprofit charter school operators “managing more than one school with a unified management team responsible for delivering the educational program and supervising skill leaders.”

“…And while most school districts set teacher compensation centrally, in almost half of all CMOs (46 percent), decisions about compensation are made at least in part based on input from schools,” they write.

The national study, in its 2011 form, will address how students’ academic achievement is affected by CMOs. However, the interim report released this June focused on structural aspects among the 43 studied CMOs.....