Anti-Bureaucrat Charter Schools Get Centralized

An interesting article about how the best charter school organizations are balancing the need for school-level autonomy with some degree of centralization:

To some, one of the main reasons charter schools are appealing  is their autonomy. With no central district to report to, teachers and  principals say they can get straight to the business of helping children  learn.
 
But a funny thing is happening with some anti-bureaucrats:  They are bureaucratizing, building central offices that function like  miniature school districts overseeing between four and 40 schools.
 
Some of the city's most successful schools espouse the central  office model, called a charter management organization. The four schools under  the KIPP umbrella and four run by the group Achievement First are managed this  way. So is the Harlem school President Bush visited this spring, part of a CMO  called Village Academies.
 
School leaders say centralization is key to their  expansion.
 
"It's the wave of the future," the CEO of a management  organization called the Success Charter Network, Eva Moskowitz,  said.

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Anti-Bureaucrat Charter Schools Get Centralized
BY ELIZABETH GREEN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 6, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/59906

To some, one of the main reasons charter schools are appealing is their autonomy. With no central district to report to, teachers and principals say they can get straight to the business of helping children learn.