Why does this matter? Only great teachers – those in the top quartile – achieve the student learning progress needed to close our nation’s achievement gaps and raise our bar to internationally competitive levels. Others do not.  Yet in two critical ways we fail to capitalize on the extraordinary resource of great teachers:

• We lose too many of the best teachers: Contrary to popular belief, overall teacher turnover is modest compared with other professions. The crisis arises from our failure to keep the best teachers. Approximately 64,000 top-quartile teachers leave teaching every year, diminishing more than a million children’s learning prospects each following year.
• We fail to leverage their talent for the benefit of students: The impact of great teachers who stay remains small over their careers. Only 600 students benefit from the instruction of an excellent elementary school teacher even if she stays on the job for 30 years. Our nation’s best teachers reach no more children than the very worst teachers.

If we don’t address these shortcomings, our glaring internal and international achievement gaps will persist, even if every state and district moves forward aggressively to recruit more great teachers and dismiss more ineffective ones.

If we do address them, by building a much more vibrant “opportunity culture” for America’s teachers, nearly 9 in 10 classes could be taught by great teachers in a mere half-decade.  The normal, expected experience of a student could be to have truly great teachers — the kind that today most children have only a few times in a whole school career.

Opportunity at the Top is the first in a series of reports supported by the Joyce Foundation, culminating in a set of recommendations for policymakers and educators about building an opportunity culture for America’s teachers.  Since we’re just getting started, we want to hear the best ideas about how to do that – so click the comment button!

In 1994, Gordon Bethune took the helm, with Brenneman becoming president and chief operating officer. They staved off bankruptcy by renegotiating with their creditors. And they launched an organizational turnaround that proved remarkably successful, catapulting Continental from worst to best among bigU.S. carriers.

By 1995, Continental was moving up on the Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) performance measures (see Figure 1). Its stock price was soaring. And the turnaround stuck. The latest rankings by Consumer Reports place Continental first among the seven big U.S. airlines. Zagat’s 2007 survey of frequent flyers found overall ratings for the big airlines were low and declining, with the “notable exception” of Continental. Continental was the only big airline, and one of only five overall, to be a Zagat Top Spot.

The mid-’90s were also a time for change in New York’s police department (NYPD). As W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe in their 2003 HBR case study, “Turf wars over jurisdiction and funding were rife. Officers were underpaid relative to their counterparts in neighboring communities…. Crime had gotten so far out of hand that the press referred to the Big Apple as the Rotten Apple.” In response, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani hired William Bratton to lead the NYPD, fresh from a string of successful turnarounds of other agencies, including NYC’s transit police.

Though crime rates in NYC had started to decline in the late 1980s, Bratton’s arrival accelerated the trend (see Figure 2). Time wrote in a 1996 cover story, “The drop became a giddy double-digit affair, plunging farther and faster than it has done anywhere else in the country, faster than any cultural or demographic trend could explain. For two years, crime has declined in all 76 precincts.” As Kim and Mauborgne note, the change wasn’t just a flash in the pan or a nationwide trend: “Statistics released in December 2002 revealed that New York’s overall crime rate [was] the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United States.”

Finding the Keys

These turnarounds are classic: rapid U-turns from the brink of doom to stellar success. They may not last forever. But if a failing school could achieve similar results for several years, thousands of students would benefit permanently. How did they happen? This article explains what we know, from plentiful cross-sector research, about how to engineer turnarounds within existing organizations. It then identifies two critical policy issues that states and districts must address to accelerate the prevalence of real, successful turnarounds in education.

Education reformers faced with failing schools and districts tend toward one of two camps: The Incrementalists hold that meaningful improvement can only happen slowly, with soul-wrenching culture change leading to instructional change and eventual student success. The Clean Slate Club believes the only way to fix failing schools is to shut them down and start fresh, with entirely new rules, staff, and leadership.

Both camps have it wrong, but for different reasons. The slow and steady approach won’t work for chronically failing organizations. The fresh-start method is much more promising, based on the dramatic success of some newly formed schools serving tough populations. But most start-ups fail or bump along in the purgatory of mediocrity, even in sectors that, unlike education, enjoy abundant venture capital and a ready stable of capable entrepreneurs. Moreover, troubled organizations across sectors regularly transform themselves from bad to great without a clean slate. The consequence of education’s failure to recognize turnarounds as a means of school improvement is twofold: in education, turnarounds have been tried rarely and studied even less. While education researchers catch up, practitioners can use the turnaround lessons of other sectors.

Essential Actions

To identify what makes turnarounds successful, we reviewed dozens of studies across a wide range of organizations: nonprofits of differing sizes, some in highly regulated industries such as health care; government agencies with varying missions; and for-profits in numerous industries. Case studies of single turnarounds comprise most of this research, including studies of both large, stand-alone entities and small units within larger organizations, closer in size to schools. The turnaround precursors, patterns of action, and chronically challenging environments we found were surprisingly consistent across these varied venues, bolstering their potential relevance to both districts and schools. Turnarounds were attempted when organizations were failing by many measures, not just financial metrics.

While this article uses the well-documented Continental Airlines and NYPD cases as illustrations, what happened in these two organizations is similar to what we saw across the research. We coded the cases from this broad research to reveal two overall success factors.

First, turnaround leaders work in an environment that gives them what we call “the big yes.” Second, bad-to-great transformations require a point-guard leader who both drives key changes and deftly influences stakeholders to support and engage in dramatic transformation. To be sure, staff help effect a turnaround, but the leader is the unapologetic driver of change in successful turnarounds. Effective turnaround leaders follow a formula of common actions that spur dramatic improvement. The actions interact to move the organization rapidly toward impressive, mission-determined results that influence stakeholders to support additional change. Below, we explain the six most consistent actions in the bad-to-great formula and provide an example of what each action might entail in school and district turnarounds.

Focus on a Few Early Wins

Successful turnaround leaders choose a few high-priority goals with visible payoffs and use early success to gain momentum. While these “wins” are limited in scope, they are high-priority, not peripheral, elements of organization performance. Early wins are critical for motivating staff and disempowering naysayers.

At Continental, Bethune and Brenneman initially focused on what Brenneman calls “the customers in seat 9C, the business travelers who book the aisle seats in the front of the plane. They pay full fare, and they travel a lot.” To win these customers back, Continental launched a massive effort to refurbish airplanes inside and out, recarpet their terminals, and upgrade food service, all in six months rather than the four years originally estimated.

These changes might seem merely cosmetic. But in fact they addressed a major concern of the customers most important to the airline’s success. And the upgrades built positive momentum for further change. As Brenneman recalls, employees “could see senior management finally taking the actions they knew had been needed for years.” For a demoralized organization, this kind of mission-focused early win is vital to convincing the team that it can in fact be successful.

At NYPD, Bratton initially launched an effort to crack down on minor offenders. While their offenses weren’t the city’s biggest crime issues, the effort helped convince skeptical citizens and officers that the police could make a difference.

In schools, early wins must tackle similarly visible goals essential to the learning mission. An elementary school might aim to raise reading scores to within one grade level of year-end goals for 90 percent of 5th graders by the first semester’s end. This is challenging in schools where many children are multiple grade levels behind. But it is achievable, as many cases of high-poverty start-up schools have demonstrated, and a necessary step toward achieving grade-level pass rates at year’s end. All other changes can support this goal. Imagine the impact when teachers realize that the school need never again graduate a class of non-readers.

A district also must focus early wins on student learning to fit the turnaround formula, perhaps by adopting similar goals for one subset of struggling children or a few low-performing schools. To achieve the goals, the district must then tackle barriers blocking success for those students or schools. For example, a district might arrange to provide targeted schools with materials online to work around book shortages or improve dramatically their access to interim assessment data. Such online materials, assessment data, and other changes in district management systems are not themselves “early wins.” They must be used as tools to achieve rapid academic results and convince stakeholders that additional focused change will produce more success.

Break Organization Norms

In a failing organization, existing practices contribute to failure. Successful turnaround leaders break rules and norms. Deviating to achieve early wins shows that new action gets new results.

In response to Continental’s financial struggles, an entrenched norm of cost cutting pervaded the organization. As Brenneman explains, the company’s “myopic focus” on costs had led to perverse tactics: skimping on cabin air conditioning and flying more slowly to cut fuel use; removing high-revenue first-class seats to squeeze in more passengers; and eliminating corporate discounts even for the airline’s top customers. Brenneman calls the result a “doom loop. By focusing only on costs, the airline had created a product no one wanted to buy.” Declining revenues sparked more ill-advised cost cutting, such as morale-sapping wage reductions.

When Bethune and Brenneman took over, they pursued strategies that actually increased costs, like the plane and terminal upgrades. The airline started paying employees more, based on performance. For every month the airline finished in the DOT’s top five for on-time arrivals, each employee received $65. The on-time bonuses cost the company $3 million per month, but improving the on-time record boosted overall financials by an estimated $8 to $9 million per month.

Like many large organizations, Continental had accumulated hundreds of regulations. The result was a nine-inch-thick tome known as the “Thou Shalt Not” book. A central part of leadership’s plan was to free employees to do what was needed to solve problems and meet customers’ needs. To make the point, the executives took a copy of the book into the parking lot, soaked it with gasoline, and torched it in front of a crowd of employees.

Bratton, too, made a practice of norm busting. At NYPD, he soon learned that only 5 percent of the budget went to narcotics forces, even though a high percentage of crimes were drug-linked. The reason? An assumption that the department’s top priority was responding to 911 calls, rather than to the kind of long-term, preemptive work done by the narcotics unit. In addition, the narcotics squad worked Monday through Friday, while narcotics activities and related crime soared on weekends. One of Bratton’s early actions was a major reallocation of staff and resources into narcotics, including shifting officers’ time to weekends.

In an elementary school, the leader might bend time-use norms by having teachers provide rolling reading instruction as children arrive on buses in the morning. Rescheduling classroom volunteers into lunch-hour chaperoning could replace lost morning teacher-planning time. This schedule adjustment would add one to three weekly instructional hours per child in many schools.

For districts, delivering individualized reading assessment and instruction to every classroom via technology, for example, would require veering from textbook and technology budgets, as these line items are typically separate. Shifting dollars can ignite turf battles, because budgets are often equated with number of staff positions and job importance of district department leaders. The key is making the learning goal the organization’s clear priority.

Push Rapid-Fire Experimentation

Turnaround leaders press a fast cycle of trying new tactics, discarding failed tactics, and investing more in what works. They resist touting mere progress as ultimate success.

Bratton’s most famous innovation was the introduction of the Compstat system, short for computer statistics, which provided everyone from precinct staff to top brass with detailed statistics and maps showing how patterns of crime and law enforcement actions played out in different places and over time. The system made possible big, department-wide strategic decisions, like the reallocation of resources to narcotics work.

Perhaps more important was the system’s value for precinct commanders as a day-to-day management tool. The Time cover story on Bratton begins with an account of a semiweekly Compstat meeting, in which a precinct commander is grilled about a rise in robberies and his response. New problems demand new strategies, and the Compstat meetings were designed to keep that fast cycle of response-measure-adjust going.

In a school, the leader might redeploy a motivated, technology-capable staff person to provide Compstat-style reports of student-by-student, teacher-by-teacher, grade-by-grade results on mandatory quizzes. This effort would provide the fodder for making changes before semester’s end. Most important, each person and team would receive timely data about the progress of students for whom each is accountable.

In a district, new interim assessment data would provide feedback about what schools, grades, and student subgroups are meeting goals. Slow progress would be a trigger for district organizers to do some problem solving.

Get the Right Staff, Right the Remainder

Successful turnaround leaders typically do not replace all or even most staff at the start, but they often replace some key leaders who help organize and drive change. For remaining staff, change is mandatory, not optional.

At Continental, cleaning house at the top of the organization was a big part of the turnaround. Of 61 officers, Bethune and Brenneman showed 50 the door. Some housecleaning took place at lower levels as well, but an organization with 40,000 employees can’t possibly transform itself by swapping out all of its people.

Continental’s new “people strategy” focused on making dramatic change mandatory for employees already in their positions. When the maintenance department told Brenneman that plane and terminal upgrades, his key “early win,” was a four-year project, Brenneman insisted on his six-month schedule: he’d find someone else to do the work if the maintenance department wasn’t up to the job. As it turns out, the department was up to the job, once it was clear that change was mandatory.

Bratton also mostly replaced leaders, not the rank and file. His “number two” was a veteran officer who knew everyone at headquarters. One of his first jobs was to help Bratton identify members of top staff likely to oppose or seek to undermine his reforms, leading to what Kim and Mauborgne call “a dramatic changing of the guard.” Bratton did replace half of his precinct commanders, but not immediately. The turnover grew out of the Compstat process. As Time wrote in 1996 on Bratton, “Effective precinct commanders…merely get grilled to a medium rare at Compstat. Those who show up unprepared, without coherent strategies to reduce crime, are fried crisp, then stripped of their commands.” Swapping out people was core to Bratton’s approach, but it followed from his turnaround efforts rather than preceding them.

In a school, the total staff replacement advocated by the Clean Slate Club would not be necessary. While not every teacher would be willing and able to do what’s needed, most would rise to the occasion. The rest typically reveal themselves during the “early win” phase and must then be removed.

The most important early staff decision would be the selection of an organizer to drive the action plan. The person might or might not be selected from the current staff and might be given power exceeding the person’s current title and tenure. This individual would ensure, for example, that analysis of student progress and instructional problem solving happened regularly, timed with the quiz schedule.

For a district turnaround, the superintendent would need to tap a trusted leader who could cut through the usual district machinery. This leader’s team would need to include additional organizers who could focus on implementation issues in targeted schools or student populations, and each of these people would need to be accountable for learning success among their assigned students. The superintendent might also replace critical department leaders from the start, making room for team members who can drive change.

Drive Decisions with Open-Air Data

Successful turnaround leaders are focused, fearless data hounds. They choose their initial goals based on rigorous analysis. They report key staff results visibly and often. All staff who participate in decisionmaking are required to share periodic results in open-air sessions, shifting discussions from excuse making and blaming to problem solving.

Again, Bratton’s Compstat meetings are a powerful example. These regular gatherings brought together top brass with all 76 precinct commanders, the police force’s key line managers. At every meeting, one commander took the hot seat, facing questions about the precinct’s performance that emerged from the Compstat data. How was the precinct working to solve the problems the data revealed? Why was performance going down on some key metrics?

The result was what Kim and Mauborgne call “a culture of performance…. An incompetent commander could no longer cover up his failings by blaming…neighboring precincts, because his neighbors were in the room and could respond. By the same token, the meetings gave high achievers a chance to be recognized.” Some commanders used similar tactics within their own precincts, extending the new culture.

Bethune and Brenneman, too, used data to drive change. As they were poised to assume the leadership of Continental, the twosome met over dinner for a week, poring over data and writing down “everything that was wrong with Continental.” The result was a set of some 15 key metrics that the pair decided to track rigorously and publicly over time and compare with those of their competitors. Results on these metrics, good and bad, became the central focus of a massive communications campaign that leadership launched inside and outside the company.

“Using data to drive instruction” has become such a mantra in public education that it’s important to pause here and explain how data strategies in successful turnarounds differ from typical K–12 data systems. The keys are using the right data to drive change and requiring all relevant staff to put their data on display in an open-air forum and then face tough questions (and helpful problem solving). The process helps people improve their practice, but it also transforms the culture.

In a school, staff capable of leading instructional change for learning results would be identified by student progress data. Those not capable of leading or accomplishing instructional change would be identified as well. The progress data would provide the school leader with a guide to the staff changes that would further improve student learning, and the achievement of early goals would help build support for such changes.

In a district, progress reports would enable the leader to evaluate the school-level leaders and district team members responsible for implementing changes by tracking the results achieved for defined groups of students within or across schools. Each of the staff leaders affected would need to be included in regularly scheduled meetings to present their own performance data for discussion.

Lead a Turnaround Campaign

Successful turnaround leaders know that change of any kind is hard and that people resist it for many reasons unrelated to success. Leaders use a consistent combination of motivating and maneuvering tactics that include communicating a positive vision of success; helping staff personally feel the problems customers feel; working through key influencers; and silencing critics with speedy success of early wins, thereby casting vocal naysayers as champions of failure.

Continental’s leadership orchestrated a “forgiveness campaign” to apologize to its unhappy customers. Officers, from the CEO through the vice presidents, divided complaint letters and started placing calls. Each officer took a city served by Continental and contacted travel agents and corporate customers. Saying “sorry” was part of the script, but the other was outlining the airline’s bold plan to fix problems. “We heard our share of shouting,” recalls Brenneman, but he argues that the campaign helped reverse the “doom loop” by convincing many customers that change was happening. Of course, this communication onslaught only worked because leadership had results to show, flowing from its early wins.

According to Kim and Mauborgne, one of Bratton’s specialties was putting managers face to face with the operational problems as a way of convincing them, in ways that no amount of memos, speeches, and PowerPoint presentations could, of the change imperative. As head of the NYC transit police, Bratton had famously battled complacency by requiring all senior managers to ride the subway to work and meetings, including at night, and did so himself.

At NYPD, Bratton hired John Miller, an investigative journalist, to lead his communications efforts, both inside and outside of the force. And he needed all the help he could get. One key “early win,” processing small “quality of life” crimes, was nearly scuttled by court officials who feared these cases would clog the dockets. By allying with the mayor and running a smart media campaign, Bratton framed the issue as make or break for NYC’s future, causing judicial leaders’ concerns to appear selfish and petty. The strategy worked.

In both schools and districts, leaders and their teams would need to analyze the required involvement and likely reaction of all stakeholders: school and district staff, parents, students, unions, and community members. At the start, most stakeholder groups would feel that their power was being reduced as the turnaround leader focused sharply on early-win goals. Leaders would need to communicate clearly how success would affect children’s later learning and work prospects. They would need to find ways for staff to empathize with children experiencing slow or no change. And they would need to identify vocal supporters and work with them to rally others to advocate for change. Most important, the leaders would need to achieve naysayer support or silence by accomplishing early student-learning gains.

The Turnaround Environment

These six key actions recur in story after story of successful turnarounds. But don’t turnaround leaders also need a supportive environment? Yes and no. Some conditions prove to be not that valuable, or even detrimental. Some scholars, for example, conclude that too much money dooms turnaround efforts, by diluting leader attention rather than focusing it on early wins.

One environmental condition is critical. Turnaround leaders need a “big yes,” a clear nod from the top in support of dramatic change, even if it causes discomfort and political fallout. However, there is no evidence that the larger organization needs to be highly effective or in turnaround mode to grant the “big yes” to a unit leader. Indeed, breaking the norms and rules of the status quo to achieve support-winning early victories is what successful turnaround leaders do.

While leaders at both Continental and NYPD had a “big yes” from their ultimate bosses, they were not handed a clean slate. Instead, they faced the same tough environmental conditions plaguing failing schools and districts: tight budgets, deep-seated status quo routines, and tough opposition from organized employees. They turned around their organizations nonetheless.

Enabling School and District Turnarounds

To enable more widespread, successful turnarounds in education, state and district leaders need to focus on two critical policy changes. First, states (particularly governors) need to create much more political will to try turnarounds at the district level and to retry when some inevitably fail. They can only do this by developing much more capacity, in-house or through contractors, to take charge of failing schools when districts don’t act.

Second, states and districts could do much more to fuel the pipeline of K–12 turnaround leaders. One key step is to open the door to noneducation leaders with turnaround competencies, induce them to take the job, and invest to equip them with the education know-how they need to succeed.

A few states and districts, such as Chicago, the District of Columbia, and Louisiana, are attempting real turnarounds. Related efforts, such as New Leaders for New Schools and the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program, are underway to help more turnaround leaders succeed. Mass Insight Education has launched a national campaign to encourage state leaders to play a more active role.

All of these initiatives are promising. And the good news is they don’t have to start from scratch. From Continental Airlines to NYPD to countless others, turnarounds have happened with dramatic results. Turnarounds can happen in education, too.

Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel are codirectors of Public Impact, a national education policy and management firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their earlier work on this topic includes School Turnarounds: A Review of Cross-Sector Evidence on Dramatic Organizational Improvement (Center on Innovation and Improvement, 2007), and Julie Kowal and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Turnarounds with New Leaders and Staff (Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, 2005).

Here’s one recent example of that quest, a report we worked with the Connecticut education advocacy organization ConnCAN to develop. Entitled “The Tab,” the study explains Connecticut’s current system and then proposes an alternative built around three ideas: having money follow children based on need, shining an intense light of transparency on data about funding flows and uses, and sweeping away barriers that keep schools and districts from doing what’s needed to get results. The Tab is here, with ConnCAN’s media release here.

We call this “reach extension,” and you can read more about it in a new working paper we prepared with support from the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation. Reach extension can take several forms, such as redesigning jobs to concentrate 3X teacher time on instruction, putting star teachers in charge of more children’s learning, and using technology to extend 3X teacher reach and meet their standard. Potential reach-extension methods vary according to the level of “touch,” or direct student interaction with 3X teachers, and “reach,” or number of children served by each 3X instructor.

By eliminating rote and non-instructional duties from 3X teachers’ schedules, many methods would increase touch and reach simultaneously – especially benefiting students who, because of age or learning needs, learn best with high levels of teacher interaction. Even high-touch, low-reach methods of reach extension could significantly increase the number of children learning from top-quintile teachers. Star teachers whose reach is extended would have unprecedented opportunities for achievement and could be paid more from existing per-pupil funding streams. We hope this working paper will launch further thinking and action to achieve “3X for All.” More immediately, we hope it will launch some comments from the Ed Next blog audience, so have at it.

Everyone has read the ubiquitous feature story about a charter school–Jane and John Q. Public and their friends, sitting around somebody’s kitchen table, dream up a different kind of school for their kids. Putting in hours of sweat equity, charging start-up costs to their credit cards, maybe even mortgaging their homes to bring their dream to reality. Making the economics work by taking parent involvement to a whole new level–parents driving buses, cleaning school bathrooms, mastering the intricacies of state financial reporting requirements.

Charter schools with origins like these can be compelling and unique, models of the outside-the-box approaches these schools are supposed to pilot. And most of the dramatic success stories from the charter world come from schools founded by teachers or community members. For example:

• KIPP Academy, Houston. At KIPP, a middle school founded by two former Teach for America members, one recent class entered with passing rates of 35 and 33 percent on state math and reading tests. The following year, the class’s rates rose to 93 and 92 percent.

• The Accelerated School, Los Angeles. Opened by two teachers in 1994 and named Time magazine’s “Elementary School of the Year” in 2001, the school reports that its scores on the Stanford Achievement test have jumped 97 percent since 1997.

• North Star Academy, Newark, New Jersey. Based on preliminary results from the spring 2000 state test, 88 percent of the school’s first 8th grade class scored proficient or above in language arts (compared with 47 percent citywide), and 66 percent scored proficient or above in math (versus 21 percent citywide).

Numbers like these are eye-catching. But can these stand-alone, typically small charter schools serve as the basis for a sustainable, large-scale movement for change in education? Or are they likely to remain the exception rather than the rule? After all, starting an innovative, successful charter school is extraordinarily difficult, and few entrepreneurs seem cut out for the job.

Small Businesses

There are certainly reasons to think of successful stand-alone charter schools as an interesting but ultimately marginal phenomenon. Starting a public school from scratch is, in a word, difficult. It has become a cliché that charter schools, in addition to being educational institutions, have to succeed as small businesses–balancing their budgets; negotiating leases, financing packages, and contracts; and making payroll. Individuals and small teams–often teachers, parents, or community activists who have never run schools–are apt to possess some but not all of these skills and backgrounds.

Opening a new school also requires capital. Most charter schools receive federally funded start-up grants of $10,000 to $150,000 for one to three years. Beyond that, they cannot expect any public funds to flow until, if they’re lucky, the July before they open. However, expenses can’t wait. Principals need to be hired a few months before school starts. Ideally, teachers start at least a few weeks before students arrive. Then there are books and bookshelves, desks and desktop computers, and all the other supplies that need to be purchased. And all of that doesn’t include the big kahuna of start-up costs: the charter school facility.

The first decade of charter schools has unearthed entrepreneurs who are willing and, in some cases, able to take on these herculean tasks. They’ve proven themselves able to secure the requisite start-up capital–by becoming enterprising fundraisers, by “partnering” with others who have deeper pockets, by finding creative ways to keep start-up costs down, or by going without amenities that are standard-issue in the typical district school. Even with all these challenges, approximately 2,700 charter schools will be open during the 2002-’03 school year, educating some 700,000 students.

This supply of entrepreneurs can work if we’re talking about a reform that captures just 1 percent of the nation’s public school market share. But what if we’re interested in creating a set of schools that educate 10 percent, 20 percent, or an even greater share of American students? Are there enough social entrepreneurs out there to do that?

Let’s consider this question. Nationally, the growth of charter schools was dramatic in the years following the passage of the initial charter laws (see Figure 1). In 2001 and 2002, however, the number of new charter schools opening in the fall actually declined compared with the previous year.

Statutory caps on charter schools have caused some of this leveling, but not all of it. Even in jurisdictions with few restrictions on new starts, the numbers tend to decline over time. It appears that within a given geographical area lives a limited supply of entrepreneurs willing to undertake starting a charter school, a supply that peters out over time. Not to zero, but to what amounts to a drop in the bucket of public schooling in a city or state.

Enter the EMOs

“Education management organizations,” or EMOs, are sometimes touted as the solution to these challenges. According to the Center for Education Reform, 19 of these companies ran 350 charter schools in 2001-’02, about 14 percent of the nation’s charter schools. Since EMO-run schools are typically larger than the average charter school, EMOs actually educate an even higher percentage of charter school students–perhaps 25 to 30 percent.

Most EMOs today are for-profit companies, such as Edison Schools and Nobel Learning Communities, but not all. Aspire Public Schools, for example, is a nonprofit seeking to operate a large chain of public schools, at least initially in California. The nonprofit New Schools Venture Fund has established a “Charter Accelerator” initiative to invest in more nonprofit EMOs.

EMOs offer many answers to the leadership supply question:

• Expertise and systems. Starting and operating a school requires expertise across a range of fields–curriculum and instructional design, facilities management, community relations. EMOs can hire experts in these areas or develop expertise over time and then share knowledge and capacity with their constituent schools. They can turn expertise into systems so that every school doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

• Economies of scale. As they operate more and more schools, EMOs can use their growing buying power to obtain favorable terms for goods and services. By negotiating bulk purchase contracts with suppliers, they can reduce per-student costs.

• Capital (for research and development and possibly facilities). At least for EMOs, the prospects of long-term profitability make it possible to raise capital from venture investors or, in a smaller number of cases, like Edison Schools, the public markets. For nonprofits, philanthropic funds serve a similar purpose. This capital allows the companies to make substantial investments in R&D–such as Edison’s multiyear curriculum design project, which took place largely before the company operated a single school. Some EMOs have also deployed capital to help meet the challenge of financing facilities.

• Incentive and capacity to cultivate leaders. As important as a company’s expertise and systems are to its schools, the quality of the school-level leadership is still critical for the success of EMO-run schools. EMOs have strong incentives to seek out high-potential leaders and develop their capabilities over time. And because they operate multiple schools, they are in a position to develop a “farm system” and create opportunities for career advancement that would not be possible in “mom-and-pop” charters.

• Incentive and capacity to sustain schools over time. If a stand-alone charter school experiences troubles, the founders or current leaders may try strenuously to get the school back on course. But if they fail, no institution is likely to do the hard work of saving the school. The school district may be glad to see the school go; the charter authorizer may not have the capacity or the philosophical inclination to intervene. But if an EMO school begins to sink, the EMO has strong incentives to rescue it. And they may have the resources to do so, by sending in new leadership or expertise.

The Dilemma of Scale

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to rely on EMOs alone to sustain the charter school sector over time, for three reasons.

First, though EMOs bring substantial monetary and human resources to the table, they are not immune from financial and management challenges of their own. One of the major national EMOs, National Heritage Academies, recently reported an annual profit. But most of the scale players in the market have been for-profits only in the legal documents. Investments in capacity and marketing have swamped revenues for the typical EMO.

Second, for-profit EMOs exacerbate the built-in political challenges of creating charter schools. Under any circumstances, charter schools ignite political controversy (see Bruno Manno’s article, “Yellow Flag“). But when they are operated by for-profit entities, they become even more of a lightning rod. Grassroots organizations like ACORN, which have supported charter schools–even started their own–have led vigorous campaigns against Edison Schools’ involvement in troubled public systems like those of Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.

These experiences raise questions about the political viability of a charter school movement that becomes largely composed of schools run by for-profit EMOs. Charter school policies have attracted unlikely coalitions that include free-marketeers and business leaders, but also community-based organizations, civil-rights groups, and other nontraditional allies. It seems that the support of nonconservative charter advocates depends, in part, on the fact that up to now the movement has been composed mostly of grassroots, community-based schools–not franchises of profit-seeking companies.

Finally, and perhaps most important, EMOs may not be the most likely source of innovation–and thus of the kind of dramatic gains in performance that we need to see in schools. For several reasons, the drive for scale militates against out-of-the-box approaches. To begin with, attracting sufficient enrollment is vital for EMOs; the need to fill seats is bound to drive companies to appeal to the “median” consumer, who might balk at strange new grade configurations or pedagogical approaches.

The companies’ internal dynamics also push toward the conventional. EMOs face the substantial challenge of scaling up an educational and organizational model across multiple sites, perhaps across a wide geography. It makes sense in that context to select the familiar, the easily conveyed. The same goes for personnel. If a company needs 30 principals, the average hire is more apt to resemble the typical principal than the renegade that a stand-alone charter school might seek.

Herein lies a great dilemma facing the charter movement. To become a serious force for change in education, charter schools as a group need to achieve greater scale. The most obvious path to scale is the proliferation of chains of schools run by education management organizations. For financial and political reasons, though, looking exclusively to EMOs for scale is a poor strategy. In addition, the breakthrough innovations that are part of the great promise of charter schools may be more likely to emerge from schools that are, at least initially, single-site start-ups. But such schools are limited in number and small in size–hardly the basis for a large-scale movement.

Resolving this dilemma requires thinking about “scale” in two new ways. First, what would it take to enable more successful, stand-alone schools to “scale up”–by replicating themselves or through other means? Second, what would it take to create an environment in which much larger numbers of successful, stand-alone charter schools can form and thrive?

Scaling Proven Models

Education is notorious for single-school success stories that serve as fodder for 60 Minutes and feature films, but are never “replicated” elsewhere. Within traditional school systems, it’s not hard to see why. The incentives to adopt good ideas from other schools are weak, and the constraints on change–from policy and culture–are strong.

The charter school strategy has the potential to overcome this conventional failure by providing a space within which it’s easier to scale up what works via the creation of new schools. But most effective charter schools remain single-site successes. Charter leaders have their hands full even several years into start-up. Their “model” may actually be heavily reliant on the personal leadership of one or more founders and/or local ties and circumstances, which are difficult or impossible to “bottle.”

Still, a small number of successful charter schools are beginning to explore scaling in one way or another:

KIPP Academies. Based on the success of the two initial KIPP academies in Houston and the Bronx, KIPP decided to scale up with support from the Pisces Foundation and other philanthropists. KIPP’s approach to scale relies on developing leaders to open and operate new public schools–both charter and district-based. The highly selective Fisher Fellows program inducts 20 to 25 aspiring school founders per year and provides them with a summer training program that includes classroom instruction at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business–half focused on business matters, and half on academic and school issues. Fellows then do a four-month residency in an existing KIPP Network school. By spring, fellows go to work founding a school–with intensive assistance from KIPP national. Support continues over three years, ending with an “inspection” to assess how well the school lives up to KIPP’s “five pillars”–the general principles that define a KIPP school.

By 2010, KIPP aims to have started a total of 200 schools nationally. If successful, the resulting network will be an interesting model. It won’t be an EMO–each school will be an independent entity, subscribing to the five pillars, but each unique. But it will capture some of the advantages of scale, primarily in the start-up phase. At this point, KIPP does not seem focused on reaping other potential values of scale, such as the power of joint purchasing or the centralization of certain routine functions.

Minnesota New Country School/EdVisions. Minnesota New Country School in Henderson, Minnesota, is unique in two respects. First, its learning program is very unusual. Almost all of its high-school instruction takes place through personalized project-based inquiry, facilitated by teachers and relying heavily on the computers sitting on nearly every child’s desk. More traditional forms of instruction are used as well, but only as needed to ensure the mastery of basic skills. Second, the school is run by a cooperative of teachers, who make all the key decisions about the school–from the learning program to the budget to hiring and firing. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the EdVisions cooperative is now seeking to spread this dual model to 15 new secondary schools over five years. Gates funding will go both to the new sites and to EdVisions central, which will provide intensive start-up assistance. Six sites are currently involved at different stages.

High Tech High. Founded by tech industry leaders and educators in San Diego, High Tech High is undertaking various efforts to scale up its design, which offers a rigorous, personalized program focusing on math, science, and technology, and providing extensive connections to the “adult” world through internships and other means. Like KIPP and EdVisions, part of High Tech High’s scale-up work involves helping others found similar schools in nine sites around the country. This initiative is also funded by the Gates Foundation. But High Tech’s approach includes other elements as well. It has developed a Learning Resource Center, a detailed online source of information about the school’s approach that allows anyone in the world to access and use the school’s resources. It is engaged in various initiatives to prepare teachers to use its approaches in their own schools. And it is participating in a local effort to design 14 new high schools to be built in San Diego over the next decade.

Nevertheless, expanding beyond a single campus or city presents added challenges–challenges that so far have prevented most successful charter schools from seriously pursuing scale. What’s needed is a new infrastructure that makes scale-up more feasible–a diverse range of service providers capable of helping schools with a whole array of needs. If such a system existed, it would be easier for successful schools to scale up, just as it would be easier for brand-new stand-alone schools to start.

Service Providers

Presently, starting a new school from scratch is just too difficult and painful, even for people who are capable of pulling it off. Much of the work goes into activities such as transportation, food service, accounting, regulatory compliance, zoning battles, mortgages, and the like, activities that are not where education needs innovative, fresh thinking. It seems likely that there is a large reservoir of entrepreneurial educators and non-educators who would be willing to engage in school start-up–if it were not such a nightmare.

Part of the answer certainly lies in the policy arena–giving charter schools equitable access to funding (including capital funds), cutting unnecessary regulations, ensuring that institutions other than local school boards can issue charters in every jurisdiction.

But just as important are internal or “supply side” solutions. Stand-alone charter schools need access to the same high-quality, pooled expertise that the best school systems and EMOs provide to their schools. They need a set of institutions that can shoulder the burdens of school start-up and management, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on building an excellent educational program. However, to retain their independence, stand-alone schools need to come to these service providers as voluntary, paying customers–not as units controlled by a larger system.

The creative challenge, then, is to imagine a “system” of providers that can deliver this kind of service. Within such a system three attributes, besides quality, seem most important: scope, intensity, and diversity.

Scope. Since operating a school is a complex undertaking, the service infrastructure needs to cover a wide range of issues on which charter school operators may need help. In many service areas, an industry of providers already exists–because school districts and private schools already demand the service. Prime examples include textbook and software publishers, information-management systems, developers of curricula and “comprehensive school reform models,” and transportation providers. In other areas, like accounting, payroll, legal services, and facilities development and financing, a host of general-purpose providers already serve nonprofits and small businesses. Many of these companies see great potential in the charter school market and have already begun offering their products and services to charter school customers.

However, even where a sector of service providers already exists, its offerings may not be well tailored to the charter context. Charter schools tend to be small, to have limited budgets, and to face uncertain futures due to the vicissitudes of the market and the threat of nonrenewal or revocation of their charters. As a result, conventional providers may find charter schools unattractive in the end. Facilities financing stands out as one illustration, but the same holds true for many curriculum and “whole school reform” providers. While learning programs like Core Knowledge and Expeditionary Learning/Outward Bound have seen real opportunities in the charter sector, others have shied away.

New institutions will need to arise–both to meet needs that are unique to charter schools and to design service packages in older service areas that make sense for charter schools.

Intensity. Every state with charter schools has at least one “technical assistance center” for charter schools, and many have more. These organizations tend to provide assistance to charter schools on all the issues they may face. Charter schools call them with every question imaginable. They publish handbooks, newsletters, and websites that seek to address charter schools’ concerns, from soup to nuts. One, the California Charter School Development Center, runs “boot camps” for new charter school leaders, running them through a litany of topics.

However, helpful as they are, technical-assistance organizations often are not able to provide intensive services to many schools. With their limited resources and broad mandate to serve all schools, it’s not possible for most of them to roll up their sleeves day in and day out or to provide full services, like accounting or special education, to charter schools.

Several answers to the need for intense start-up help are emerging in the marketplace. One is the charter school “incubator,” exemplified by the Education Resource Center (ERC) in Dayton, Ohio. ERC gets more involved in schools’ start-up efforts than most providers of technical assistance, serving as temporary adjunct staff. It is also more selective. Like a venture-capital firm, it sizes up a client’s prospects diligently before providing help. Incubators have succeeded in the small-business world, but charter incubators are too new to show results. Another avenue is a growing number of fee-for-service start-up providers, such as the Minnesota-based nonprofit SchoolStart. Charter entrepreneurs contract with these organizations to provide all-purpose help in the start-up phase–help in preparing the charter application, writing the budget, finding a facility, selecting an appropriate learning program, and hiring teachers. The Education Performance Network (EPN), the professional-services affiliate of New American Schools, is taking a different tack by creating an “education management support organization.” EPN offers clients a menu of services including data management, accountability and evaluation, program design, and charter start-up and implementation. A key aim of EPN is to help build charter schools’ ability to manage themselves over time.

A third trend is the emergence of leadership development programs for would-be charter entrepreneurs. Examples include the Fisher Fellowship program, New Leaders for New Schools, and the Massachusetts Charter School Resource Center’s Leadership Institute. These organizations seek to provide in-depth training to potential school leaders, including both classroom and on-the-job components. Some follow up the learning with hands-on start-up assistance for graduates.

Finally, several national organizations have begun to help their local affiliates start charter schools. The YMCA is one. Another is the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic advocacy and development organization. La Raza has put together the most intensive package of services–including hands-on consulting for community-based groups starting charter schools, joint professional development opportunities, and the creation of national partnerships that can be useful to all of the network’s schools–which La Raza hopes will number 50 by 2005.

Diversity. Third, schools needs access to a variety of providers so they can shop around for the best quality, fit, and prices. In contrast to district-based service systems, in which the central office or its chosen contractors provide all services to schools, the essence of the charter school service system must be diversity and choice.

On this front, early trends are promising. Across the different domains of service, many different types of providers are emerging. Besides the for-profit and nonprofit providers already mentioned, charter schools in some places have formed cooperatives and associations to take advantage of economies of scale. Special education has been an especially fertile area for charter cooperatives, with models emerging in the District of Columbia, Texas, Minnesota, and Indianapolis. For example, the D.C. Public Charter School Cooperative, with 21 members, aims to provide information to members about the complexities of special education, hire and make available specialized staff that no school would want to employ alone, and develop a Medicaid billing system to increase reimbursements for special- education services.

Developing the range of service providers necessary to expand the charter movement will require investment on the part of firms, philanthropists, and governments at the local, state, and national level. If this comes to pass, we can imagine a charter school sector characterized by both scale and a diversity of entrepreneurial schools, a future in which grassroots charter schools remain the heart of the movement, but in a sustainable fashion.

-Bryan C. Hassel is president of Public Impact, a consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Emma attends a school where more than 95 percent of the students achieve at grade level, including Emma. But listen to Elaine, her mother: "This is such a bad school. I'm sorry, but it is." A bold statement made by a small, stay-at-home mother who regularly cuts conversations short because she is uncertain whether her concerns are worth the air time. Today Elaine has something to say, and she is saying it out loud, on the playground, and we all listen. Her child, a creative, bright-by-any-measure child, "just missed" the high math group last year, and Elaine did not realize the consequences until it was too late.

"I kept thinking [the teacher] would do the right thing for Emma. She was so nice and friendly. I thought she recognized Emma's talents. But it never happened.… Emma was losing her self-esteem." Self-esteem seems mushy until you see what it means for Emma, who now believes she can't "do math."

And what about Jacob?

Jacob's mom, Veronica, was single, worked two jobs to make ends meet, and refused to take free school lunches even when she qualified. Her son's district was offering a new choice plan and Jacob, African-American, tested at 110 percent of average. Though Jacob's school had won a national award for its work with poor and minority children and the principal was kind to Veronica and Jacob, Veronica had a nagging feeling that something was not right.

At Veronica's request, we looked at the numbers and found that the school's scores, by any measure other than a relative one, were abysmal. Four out of every ten students like Jacob—eligible for free lunch—were failing. Moreover, a scant few scored at the tier above grade level.

Jacob was capable of much more—his achievement despite great obstacles showed that. His mother knew he needed more. His school was content with less.

Emma and Jacob ride the powerful education sea. It ebbs, shifts, creates opportunities—and can destroy them. Policymakers and administrators, like waves, come and go. Their reforms affect Emma and Jacob, but they are not really made for these particular children at all. An individual child's success and joy—even in learning—do not direct the sea.

Parents stand ashore, typically with the right compass, but rarely with a choice about which vessel might take their kids where they need to go. Meanwhile, waves of well-intentioned policies carry their children this way and that. While these policies may work for some children some of the time, they rarely meet the needs of all.

We wish we could tell you that Emma's school is firmly committed to tracking, and that's why she was passed over; that a simple change of school or district policy would do the trick. But not so. In fact, her district "mandates" differentiation—flexible, changing work at each child's level—to ensure that every child is challenged and successful.

But a mandate is no match for habit. And choice, as Jacob's mother discovered, is no good in the absence of good information.

Parents like Elaine and Veronica, and the stories they tell about their children, should change our measure of school excellence. They are not ideologues. They have no political agenda. They are guided by one compass—their children—as they navigate the education sea. Why can't schools do as well?

Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel are coauthors of Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child's School with Confidence, The Elementary Years, K–6 (Armchair Press 2004) and codirectors of Public Impact, an education policy and management firm. The Hassels have two school-age children of their own.