No Victory Yet for Victory Schools

Educational management organizations (EMOs) are for-profit management companies that provide operational assistance to charter schools, usually focusing on back office functions such as accounting, legal help, and human resources. EMOs frequently come under fire for charging higher management fees than non-profit CMOs and, of course, for being for-profit entities that are possibly more prone to corruption. In New York, 50% of closed charter schools were operated by an EMO at one point in time.

Victory Schools operates 7 of the 9 EMO charter schools in New York City. (The other two – Harriet Tubman Charter School and Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School—are run by EdisonSchools and National Heritage Academies, respectively.) On average, each Victory charter school paid around $2,163 per pupil for the EMO’s services. This comes out to be around 17% of their total per pupil revenues from the State.

Meanwhile, the five Victory Schools had an average Progress report score in 2008-2009 that placed them in the bottom 35% of all charter schools and in the bottom 20% of schools citywide. The two schools that did not have scores – the NYC Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industries and the Bronx Global Learning Institute for Girls – both opened in 2008 and thus did not receive progress report scores. Both, however, received evaluations of “underdeveloped” from the NYC DOE.

The full spreadsheet, with our calculations, is available here. For more on management fees and charter schools, check out our previous post here.

Comments

[Francis]

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