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The think tank Education Sector caused quite a stir last week when it released a scrubbed version of Tom Toch's report on Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). In the original draft, Toch questioned whether even the best CMOs could spawn many more charter schools without diluting their quality. The official version of the report soft-pedaled Toch's critique of CMOs and tacked an odd set of recommendations, mostly a CMO wish list, onto the end. Yet even as published, the report unleashes forces its own anodyne recommendations can't contain. No matter what version you read, the report challenges the current charter hype.

Some Big Lessons

Thanks to bloggers Alexander Russo and Marc Dean Millot, we can compare the final report to the draft Toch actually wrote oh so many months ago. The draft, which Russo and Millot posted on their site, cuts deeper than the official version. The language is more intense, the examples more vivid, the implications more starkly drawn.

Here are a few ideas I took from the draft:

You can't expect superstar teachers to save the day. Young, eager teachers in charter schools are exhausted, burning out, too busy to have children of their own, and cycling out of their jobs soon after they enter. That situation is barely sustainable, much less "scalable," as the current jargon goes.

CMO bureaucracies are beginning to look like school districts. And maybe that's not all bad. Charter schools need central office support (gasp!), and that costs money. The best CMOs have learned that their schools will not flourish in splendid isolation. Tell this to the True Believers of the charter movement, who have long seen central offices as just so much bureaucratic bloat.

The best charter schools cost money. A lot of money. Toch breaks down the high costs of operating some of the nation's most successful charters. Why do they cost so much? Because they offer longer days, longer years and extra services to make up for the challenges of teaching students who live in poverty.

It has become fashionable to claim that money barely matters, or even that our benighted public school leaders could benefit from belt tightening in these lean years. As it turns out, the CMOs that were meant to teach traditional public schools about efficiency have a very different lesson to give.

For-profit "education management organizations" have fallen far short of their hype.Toch's story includes a fascinating sub-plot that Education Sector left on the cutting room floor: the struggles of for-profit school management outfits. The draft suggests that profits and student learning do not always mix. What's good for the shareholders is often not good for the kids.

The Recommendations Fall Short

Don't get me wrong. Most of those points also appear in the authorized version of the report, even thought they've been neutered and declawed. That's what makes the report's final recommendations so surprising. Even as it stands, the official report is one of the clearest indictments you'll find anywhere of plans to expand charter school networks quickly. In light of all the challenges CMOs face, the recommendations are weak medicine, indeed. An aspirin won't cure congestive heart failure.

Many of the recommendations seek to topple legislative barriers to expansion. Fair enough, but such measures just scratch the surface of the problems the report describes. Indeed, some--like killing charter school caps--might worsen them.

The recommendation that states relax teacher education and certification requirements also falls short. Again, they are fair enough, but would they really solve charters' costly turnover problems and magically lure legions of new teachers into many more burnout factories?

The recommendations about money come a bit closer to addressing the problems the report lays out: Give CMOs much, much more federal money. This is the kind of talk that prompts eye-rolling when it comes from people in traditional public schools. Yet the report's authors do make a half-hearted attempt to include traditional schools in their largesse: "Public schools that deliver results--charter or otherwise--shouldn't just get equal funding; they should get additional funding to reflect their additional costs." This is about 50 percent true. All schools that face bigger challenges should get more--and not only after they "deliver results." Isn't the whole point of the preceding report that schools serving kids in poverty need more money to "deliver results?"

The report has already let the genie out of the lamp, and the recommendations aren't enough to conjure it back in.

The final recommendation does come closer to the mark: "Federal leaders must be careful not to overburden charter management organizations.... Federal initiatives for CMOs should be ambitious but are overwhelming given where most CMOS are in their growth cycles." In other words, we should all cool our ardor, lest we kill the very success we want to expand.

Like the final report, Toch's draft honors the real passion and achievements of the best charter leaders. Unlike the final report, Toch challenges the "establishment" and "reformers" to collaborate rather than compete. (See his recent Education Week commentary for a preview of this argument.)  Both sides face similar struggles. Both need more money and better accountability systems. But neither side has been very keen on friendship so far.

Glimmers of Investigative Journalism

Even in its tamed form, the report reminds us of what investigative journalism looks like. For the most part, major newspapers have been happy to keep the emperor in his imaginary clothes. Too many pundits have been naive cheerleaders for rapid charter school growth.

Even worse, journalists barely flutter an eyelid when think tanks churn out reports pushing radical changes that rest on little or no evidence. For example, proposals that we hand all schools over to CMOs (Tough Choices or Tough Times) or abolish all but a few school districts (Lou Gerstner) go basically unchallenged. The Education Sector report pops both of those bubbles.

Let's see if any big newspapers notice. Hope springs eternal.

Update: I don't see much evidence that Education Sector itself is doing much to promote the report. Neither of the blogs Education Sector sponsors has even mentioned it. On the day EdSector released the report, one of the organization's bloggers--EdSector co-founder Andy Rotherham--promoted charter school data from another organization, the charter-friendly Center for Education Reform. Nary a word about his own organization's study.