Minnesota’s 1991 charter schools law set a precedent for how schools should be organized and operated. It envisioned teachers, principals, and community leaders coming together to apply for a charter to open one school at a time, with each charter governed by an individual board of directors. Though straightforward, this model provided limited opportunities to replicate success, which often occurred in partnership with educational management organizations (“EMOs”).
California’s 1998 cap lift bill provided a different solution to the challenge to scale. The founder of the state’s first charter school, Don Shalvey, thought this bill most go beyond a cap lift: “[A]n infinite number of charters all needing a board that that was a challenge all by itself” because it “was both inefficient and probably could create more problems with governance.”
That’s why that bill contained a first-in-the-nation provision to allow one board of directors to hold multiple charters to operate multiple schools, resulting in the charter management organization (“CMO”).
Once this bill became law, Shalvey received a call from the one of the nation’s leading philanthropic supporters of charter schools. Shalvey recalled: “They said, ‘You’re going to grow this thing. You’re going to, you know, grow.’ No one was even calling it a CMO at the time. ‘You’re going to build an organ, a nonprofit. It’s going to do a bunch of schools with one board, right?’ Yes.”
In 1998, Shalvey and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reed Hastings, launched the nation’s first CMO, Aspire Public Schools, to share back-office functions, curriculum models, teacher training, and data systems under a common board of directors. Others followed. KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), which began with two schools in Houston and the Bronx, grew into a national network. Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, brought similar models their regions. The model grew in popularity, surpassing EMOs’ position as the organizational model of choice to operate multiple schools.
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