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Unusual Charter School Collaboration Takes Shape in Cleveland

How do you scale up high-quality charter school models? The question is being answered in effective ways around the country as successful programs replicate and expand. In September 2011, the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program (CSP) announced nine grants totaling $25 million to replicate and expand high-quality charter schools. The grants will serve nearly 45,000 students in 124 new and three expanded charter schools over the next five years. One of those grants, a $3.5 million award, will go to support an unusual program in Cleveland, Ohio. Leaders of three charter school models that are focused on boosting achievement among students in high-poverty communities in the city have formed a charter management organization (CMO) in an effort to be more efficient and impactful while preserving the schools' autonomy. This month's National Charter School Resource Center newsletter covers key issues and challenges associated with the Breakthrough Public Charter Schools CMO, including the method of building on the idea of cooperation, challenges of leadership integration, organizational structure, and motivations for the project. The newsletter also includes resources to further pursue the issues.

Breakthrough's goal is to operate 20 schools serving 7,000 students by 2020. The schools under the Breakthrough umbrella are Citizens Academy, a K-5 school started in 1999 that enrolls about 400 students; The Intergenerational School (TIS), a K-8 school that started in 2000 that enrolls about 220 students; and Cleveland Entrepreneurship Preparatory School (E Prep), a 6-8 school that opened in 2006, and Village Preparatory School (Village Prep), a planned K-5 school that started in 2009 with 90 kindergartners, that serve about 450 students and have the same founders. Two more Breakthrough schools opened in the fall of 2011: Citizens Leadership Academy, a planned 6-8 school that opened with nearly 100 sixth graders, and Near West Intergenerational School, a planned K-8 school that opened with about 70 students in Grades K-4. Three more schools are expected to open in fall 2012. In August 2011, Breakthrough bought four surplus Cleveland Metropolitan School District school buildings for $1.5 million. Breakthrough was the only bidder for the surplus school buildings, which Ohio state law requires first to be offered to charter schools at the appraised fair market value. The Breakthrough project was presented at the 2011 National Charter Schools Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, which provides the foundation for this report.

School Leaders Test Their Relationships, Commitment to Cooperation

Perry White, who started Citizens Academy, described the beginnings of the collaboration project.

"By about 2006, we were really doing well and felt confident we were on track to keep getting better and better," said White, whose school was named a National Blue Ribbon School in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education. "The question was, What do we need to do to ensure the future stability of the school? We wanted to grow and we were finding it very difficult to see where we could get the traction and the capacity."

A complex mix of issues was at work, including sustaining the school after his departure. White, who became a full-time urban education consultant in September 2011, described concerns about keeping the school strong both financially and academically in the face of the constant pressure of raising money, trying to draw top staff talent and the dicey politics in the state that affect charter schools.

The school's governing board asked White to examine remaining as a single school and growing on their own by improving operations.

The third option was growing with others. "The first time a board member mentioned the idea, I just remember thinking that's an incredibly stupid idea," he said. "You will never get charter leaders to cooperate and do that."

But the reality, as White saw it, was that "if you represent one school, you're marginalized; if you represent several schools, you're probably better off."

So about four years ago, White started reaching out, including to the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF), which provides support for expanding successful charter schools. Relationships already existed among Citizens Academy leaders and leaders of the other nearby charter schools.

The schools have common bonds in their focus on academic success, but also differences in their approaches and the backgrounds of their developers. White took on his charter school project after serving as a social worker in New York City, and at the school a variety of programs are used to support connections with students and their families outside school. John Zitzner, one of the founders of E Prep and Village Prep, is a software entrepreneur and entrepreneurial culture at his schools is used to help students see the relevance of their learning. Catherine C. Whitehouse, a developmental psychologist, is the principal of TIS. The school guides academic advancement in step with the individual student's own pace, serving students of multiple ages in the same classroom.

The Ohio Department of Education has six designations for schools: Excellent With Distinction, Excellent, Effective, Continuous Improvement, Academic Watch, and Academic Emergency. As a whole, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District received a rating of Academic Watch for 2010-11, down from Continuous Improvement the prior year, despite what a statement from the district described as extensive progress across a wide range of performance measures. For 2010-11, Citizens Academy was rated Excellent, the same rating it received the prior year; TIS Excellent With Distinction, up from Excellent the prior year; and E Prep Excellent, up from Effective the prior year. Village Prep has not yet received a rating.

White said he had tested the idea of cooperation with Zitzner and Whitehouse. At one breakfast meeting, White and Zitzner came to realize they had both spent an hour with the same vendor and that it might make sense to consolidate the time. White had an exchange with Whitehouse at a conference in Columbus, Ohio, about school leader fatigue and about whether the wearying bureaucratic elements of operations could be streamlined.

Eventually, after meeting with their boards, the three decided to explore collaboration.

Moving a Promising Idea Forward Requires a Method

Enter Sally Parker, founder of Currere, a firm that helps organizations design themselves to be more effective and sustainable. A foundation grant was tapped to hire Parker to convene and work with the school leaders to examine their motivations and goals.

"Fortunately, we had a group of schools that realized how important it was to slow down and take time and really build a solid foundation," Parker said. "It's easy to get ahead of yourself." She said that working through such issues as the core values and shared purposes that would bind the organization was critical.

A core group of six leaders participated in biweekly two-hour discussions. Part of the process was developing trust and learning to work together. "It was also very important to get clear and articulate explicitly what were the nonnegotiables," Parker said. Those issues centered on autonomy of curriculum and academic models. The word merger was banned. "The team built trust not by talking about it but by doing the work," she said. The result of the meetings was an agreement to move forward with the project, establish a charter management organization, and install someone to lead it.

Zitzner said success was a long shot.

"Most collaborations don't work," Zitzner said. "You know that, right? It sounds like a good idea until you actually do it. And then you find out that what you really like is the way you were doing it before."

Pain is a key variable. "What we all learned was that if you're not in some pain that you're trying to solve, you probably won't change much," Zitzner said. "That's probably just human nature. Pain causes change." The pain was sufficient to drive change.

Alan Rosskamm, former chief executive of Jo-Ann Stores, the national fabric and craft retailer, was tapped to oversee the Breakthrough CMO. Zitzner said recruiting him was one of the simpler steps in the project. Zitzner said he asked and Rosskamm, who had been a school donor, said yes.

"He was charged with figuring out how to build a CMO," Zitzner said. That effort included visits with other CMOs around the country.

Zitzner said the development of Breakthrough and its ambitious goal to transform Cleveland schools has provided the kind of leverage that was missing when the schools were working alone.

"Magically, when we came to people as Breakthrough Charter Schools, the network of four schools to be six next year, to be eight the next year, to be 20 schools by 2020, people seemed to look at us differently," Zitzner said.

Among those looking at the charters differently was CSGF, which has granted Breakthrough $2 million. "Our organization finds great charter operators and helps them scale," said CSGF partner and vice president Darryl Cobb, a former CEO of ACT Charter School in Chicago and chief learning officer at the KIPP Foundation. Key considerations that drove the CSGF investment in Breakthrough were that it was a collaboration of successful models, not an attempt to by a strong school to shore up weaker schools, that the schools are all rooted in a common mission, and the involvement of a Fortune 500 CEO like Rosskamm-all of which "spoke very well of the opportunity."

Deft Management of Tension Within the Organization Is Critical

Breakthrough formally launched in July 2010, starting with combining areas like financial management and IT, according to Lyman Millard, Breakthrough's communications director.

"This wasn't a home run right out of the gate," said Millard, who came to the job from a similar post at Citizens Academy. "There were definitely some stumbling blocks."

"When you're used to having your accountant in the office next to you and now your accountant is somewhere else and is trying to manage not just your school but other schools, it creates some tension," Millard said. "If making your accountant's life easier means you're frustrating your lead educators unnecessarily just for the sake of bureaucracy, well, that's not what we're trying to do here."

Initial recruitment of staff also will be handled by Breakthrough, with the higher profile of the CMO expected to translate into a better pipeline of talent. Decision about who actually gets jobs will be made by the individual schools. One of the schools recently hired a principal from New Orleans who wanted to be part of Breakthrough.

"You can see this starts to snowball pretty quickly," Millard said.

The work of raising money and advocacy will be provided by Friends of Breakthrough, which will be its own not-for-profit entity. The three models together in the past few years have raised a little over $2 million per year. The goal next year is $5 million, according to Zitzner.

The governance structure is complex. Each of the schools' governing boards is responsible for operating the schools. The law in Ohio states that no one can be on more than two charter school boards at a time and no one can serve on a CMO board and an individual school board at the same time. There is a year waiting period to transition between the boards.

"A year ago, each of the boards entered into very complex contracts with Breakthrough for the management of the schools," White said. "So the parameters are set."

Inherent tension exists between the schools and the CMO. "There is a value for each school to have a board to provide a counterweight to the very significant energy that comes by way of the head of the CMO," White said. Noting issues such as cutting costs, White said the use of four academic leaders, as with the Citizens model, might be questioned by the CMO. "That tension has to be managed really well," White said.

Millard noted that the development of Breakthrough began in June 2007. "If we had tried to rush it, it would have been invalid," he said.

White emphasized the importance of the existing relationships. "That fact that the leaders who worked at this for months and months and months thoroughly liked and respected each other was not insignificant for the success," he said. "Had even a few of us not liked each other it really could have gone unsolved."

News

U.S. Department of Education Announces $4.8 Million in Charter School Planning, Start-Up, and Dissemination Grants

The U.S. Department of Education has announced $4.8 million in grants to charter developers for planning and initial implementation, and for dissemination projects, in 10 states.

The grants will provide funding to 23 new or recently opened charter schools over the next three years and help three top charter schools partner with other charter and noncharter public schools to improve academic performance and share effective practices. The grants, announced October 5, 2011, are funded through the Charter Schools Program.

Ohio Department of Education Ranks Authorizers; Nine Barred From Adding New Schools

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) now for the first time has ranked charter school authorizers on the basis of a new scoring system and announced that nine that were in the bottom 20 percent are barred from opening additional schools for at least a year. Read more.

Navy Base Facility Targeted for Charter School

A building on Naval Station Great Lakes that housed corpsmen training programs until July 2011 could become home to a K-8 charter school, according to North Chicago School District 187, which is seeking proposals from charter operators. Read more.

New White Papers Offer Practical Guidance on City-Based Strategies for Charter School Development

Improving city-based strategies for supporting development of high-quality charter schools is the focus of three new white papers produced with the support of the National Charter School Resource Center (Resource Center) and the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program.

Produced by Public Impact, a national education policy and management consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the white papers offer practical approaches for city-based organizations seeking to support creation of high-quality charter schools and development of talent pipelines, as well as guidance for prospective investors.

The white papers provide deeper information about key issues raised at a May 2011 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, that was hosted by the Resource Center and the U.S. Department of Education and focused on city-based charter school strategies.

Incubating High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in City-Based Organizations explores how the members of a national network of city-based organizations-the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust-are using one promising approach to creating high-quality school options: incubating charter school leaders.

Developing Education Talent Pipelines for Charter Schools: A Citywide Approach explores how New Orleans and Indianapolis are developing robust talent pipelines to expand the supply of effective charter school teachers and leaders in their cities.

Developing City-Based Funding Strategies: Investments to Create a Robust Charter Sector explores four questions philanthropies should consider as they decide where and how to make strategic investments in their local charter sector that will yield the greatest impact.

Rhode Island District Superintendent Describes Start of Collaboration With Charter Schools

A collaboration between a charter school and the Central Falls School District in Rhode Island that began five years ago has broadened into a formal cooperation compact involving area charter schools and stands to gain $100,000 in support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The effort began with a small step, according to district superintendent Frances Gallo. She was visiting homes soon after she started her job in 2007 and during one stop the family got a call reporting that their daughter had received a spot in a charter school through the lottery. Read more.

Events

February 27-29, 2012: The Second Annual Green Schools National Conference will be in Denver, Colorado.

Resources

High-Quality Charter Schools at Scale in Big Cities

This 2006 report summarizes the results of a symposium sponsored by the National Charter School Research Project and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools that focused on the challenges and promise of expanding the success of charter schools. The report provides context and commentaries about maintaining quality, school district politics, governing boards, the role of funders, and policy recommendations.

Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation's Best Charter Schools

This 2009 report from the policy group Education Sector provides background about leading CMOs and describes their growth, including financial and regulatory challenges.

Scaling Up Charter Management Organizations: Eight Key Lessons

The 2009 guidebook from the University of Southern California's Center on Educational Governance covers key lessons drawn from research involving 25 CMOs. The report describes lessons learned and details insights about growth strategies, communication, financing, and the cultivation of relationships, among other issues.

The National Study of Charter Management Organization (CMO) Effectiveness: Report on Interim Findings

This 2010 report provides interim findings in a national research project designed to measure nonprofit charter school management organizations' (CMOs') impact on student achievement and describes structures, practices, and policy environments. The study by Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education began in 2008 and will end in 2011. The report provides extensive descriptions and data about CMO operations.

Achieving Excellence at Scale: State Support for High-Performing Charter School Expansion

This 2009 issue brief from the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices provides insight into policy directions and best practices for states seeking to scale up their high -performing charter schools, including defining charter school quality, streamlining reporting, and support for access to facilities.

Delivering on the Promise: How Missouri Can Grow Excellent, Accountable Public Charter Schools

This 2011 report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools examines the charter school landscape in Missouri, including the performance of schools, accountability structures, and the support environment. It also includes recommendations for improvement, including greater involvement of higher education and recruitment of successful charter management organizations and school leaders.