Business Model | Ascend Learning

Ascend Learning offers an educational model that can be sustained and scaled without limit.

Public schools, long accustomed to hefty annual increases in revenues, are facing new pressures to sharply reduce costs. The fiscal crisis facing the states is likely to be prolonged and wrenching. At the same time, recent international comparisons of student achievement have lent new urgency to the drive to improve educational outcomes.

These twin pressures have resulted in a new interest in the efficiency of schooling models. Nowhere is the need for schools that produce superior outcomes for less money greater than in our largest cities. Ascend Learning is meeting this need.

Enhanced Productivity

Ascend Learning’s model permits teachers to achieve gap-closing results while working at a sustainable pace. Equipped with unusually effective tools—the SABIS educational systems and the No Excuses school culture—Ascend’s teachers are exceptionally productive, accomplishing more with their students in less time.

Our teachers are committed career educators. They see our schools as supportive workplaces for the long term, not as stopping points on the way to careers in other fields. Making reasonable demands on their time and energy reduces staff burnout, increases retention, and lowers recruiting and training costs.

Unlike other high-performing school networks, Ascend relies on neither an exotic labor pool nor ongoing philanthropic support. The result: an educational model that can be sustained and scaled without limit.

Robust Economics

Most high-performing charter schools rely on small class sizes and team teaching. Both are expensive, leaving few resources available for securing private space or defraying the cost of the network office.

Ascend’s educational outcomes rely on neither. Instead, superior intellectual property fuels superior outcomes, permitting Ascend to pay its teachers more while dramatically enhancing the economics of the school. Teachers comfortably manage larger classes, because the SABIS design assures that they are prepared to work at grade level, without the accumulated learning gaps and disaffection with schooling that overwhelm teachers in ordinary urban classrooms.

School size, class size, and staff deployment are the primary drivers of a school’s economics, and in each respect, the Ascend design is efficient. Robust site economics permit the schools in the Ascend network to occupy private space (avoiding the political vulnerability and strife of locating in district school buildings) and to pay the network office for the services it centrally provides. These management fees, across the schools, are together sufficient to fund the network office, obviating philanthropic support to fund the chronic operating deficits that challenge other charter school networks.

While CMOs commonly incur deficits undertaking the costly development and provision of academic management tools and other school supports that swell their central office expenses, Ascend Learning holds an exclusive license to the SABIS educational system—an expanding wealth of intellectual property fueled by SABIS’s investment, not that of Ascend or the schools it manages. SABIS’s product development agenda far exceeds in scope what CMOs can commonly afford to undertake; in effect, Ascend is leasing the intellectual property it could scarcely afford to develop itself. Because Ascend and the schools it manages are self-sustaining (they do not rely on large and continuing grants from foundations), the network’s reach can be expanded without limit.

Sustainable Operations

The management fees Ascend receives, coupled with the organization’s lean cost structure, have resulted in financial surpluses at each school and the network office from the organization’s second year of operation—a first for a charter management organization. For most CMOs, break-even remains elusive, requiring an ever-increasing number of schools.