As two shifts in public education unfold at the same time, Cleveland families are seeing their school options change.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District is closing and merging dozens of schools in response to enrollment declines. The sweeping reorganization has also led to the consolidation of smaller, themed high schools into larger campuses with a similar set of strong academics at every school.
Meanwhile, a newish nonprofit, Future Ready Cleveland, has brought a crop of specialized charter schools to the city.
Those schools get public money but operate independently of CMSD. Some of them will offer the kind of school experience — smaller, with specialized academic or career training programs — the district is stepping away from as it consolidates.
The two approaches might appear to be moving in opposite directions. But both are connected to a decades-old theory about how cities should organize public education, called the portfolio model.
Under that model, which is also sometimes referred to as the portfolio strategy, city and district leaders offer families a collection — or portfolio — of school options to choose from. Individual schools have more freedom to operate but are expected to produce academic results. Schools that fall short are supposed to be shuttered.
Cleveland embraced this model in 2012 with the Cleveland Plan, which sought to increase the number of high-quality schools across the city. What is different now is what kinds of new schools are being created, where the startup money is coming from, and who—if anyone—can hold all publicly funded schools accountable to high standards.
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What’s behind a new push to bring high quality schools to every Cleveland neighborhood
Future Ready Cleveland is funding new charter schools and reshaping education options along the way.
New attempts to increase quality school access across Cleveland
Future Ready Cleveland was founded in 2024 by Holly Trifiro, the former chief of education to Mayor Justin Bibb. Its goal is to bring high-quality school options to every Cleveland kid, regardless of who’s operating those schools, Trifiro said.
So far, the nonprofit has supported the start up of at least three charter or charter-like schools that are set to open their doors in the next two years. An all-girls leadership academy, in Union-Miles Park, funded by the nonprofit already welcomed its first class this fall. Cleveland might have a lot of options, Trifiro said, but many of the quality schools are concentrated on the West Side, a disparity Future Ready is looking to address.
“It’s an ingrained mindset that Clevelanders choose their schools,” Trifiro said. “How do we solve for that intersection of quality and need?”
Future Ready is tackling the issue with money from a national organization, City Fund. That group has an emphasis on “expanding public school choice,” Kristen Forbriger, a spokesperson for the group, told Signal Cleveland.
On its website, City Fund heralds cities with portfolio-style education systems as successes. It was also founded by advocates for portfolio-style reforms, including Neerav Kingsland, who early in his career helped shepherd the transformation of New Orleans into an almost all-charter school city. Now, Kingsland works at the artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
Though City Fund has invested heavily in cities that use aspects of the portfolio model, Forbriger said the group is more focused on backing local leadership than pushing a particular kind of school reform.
“The people that are best positioned to improve schools are local leaders on the ground,” she said. “We back them with resources.”
Future Ready’s work has launched as Cleveland’s public school district is shrinking due to declining enrollment and budget woes. As the district has closed and consolidated schools, some of the smaller and unique programs have been shuttered or absorbed into other schools.
A few schools recruited by Future Ready are similar to some of the smaller, themed high schools that CMSD is losing through its mergers. For example, the group gave a grant to Bio-Med Science Academy, a state-designated STEM school. Through its merger with East Tech, the CMSD-run STEM school, MC2STEM, lost its designation.
District leaders say financial need led to some of the changes but that they will also allow CMSD to offer rigorous academic programs like Advanced Placement classes at all high schools.
What is the portfolio model and where did it come from?
The portfolio model was developed in the mid-1990s, with Paul Hill, the founder of Center on Reinventing Public Education, coining the term.
The model decentralizes control over schools and prioritizes parent choice. As a tradeoff, schools are held accountable with the threat of closure or reform by a “manager.”
“The metaphor of portfolio management was just that the district sees itself as overseeing and supporting a group of diverse schools,” Hill told Signal Cleveland.
The strategy varies from place to place, but its key ingredients are:
- The ability for students and families to choose from a variety of schools that fit their needs. They can be district-run or charter-run.
- Schools that have autonomy to run themselves, hire preferred staff and not use standard curriculums. Hill described it this way: “School leadership is actual leadership.”
- A “manager” holds schools accountable by looking at test scores, closing or reforming schools that aren’t up to par. That manager can be a nonprofit organization or some other governmental body or the public school district, which it often was in early versions of the model.
In many cities that have adopted the strategy, charter schools have also expanded. One of the goals of the model, Hill said, was for districts to view charters as “local assets” that could, with the right oversight, belong to the portfolio they were building for parents.
The Cleveland Plan was a version of the ‘portfolio model’
This isn’t the first time public school choice has been brought to Cleveland as a way to tackle the city’s school quality issues. In 2012, the Cleveland Plan, which was developed under former Mayor Frank Jackson, sought to expand the number of high-quality schools while bringing the portfolio model to the city.
It was developed in conjunction with local business leaders, the Cleveland and Gund Foundations and the nonprofit charter-school network Breakthrough. The plan also had support from state legislators who helped tweak state law to allow for some of its reforms, like the sharing of levy dollars with charter schools that were sponsored or partnered with CMSD. That meant the district had more oversight of them.
Hill remembers watching the discussions at the time and noticing the portfolio model was being positioned as a way “to create kind of a sense of new starts” in Cleveland. Since then, he’s also seen how cities like Cleveland make mistakes in implementing the model, for example, dragging their feet on addressing low-performing and underenrolled schools.
“Once the enrollment shifts started, then you got the situation where a lot of existing schools got more and more underenrolled and more expensive and had less to offer, but they weren’t getting help to change,” Hill said. “And I think that, in some ways, is a profound failure of implementation of the strategy.”
The plan had four major pillars:
- Growing the number of high-performing schools (both charter and traditional public).
- Transferring autonomy from district- to school-level leadership.
- Investing in reforms from preschool to high school.
- Holding charter and district schools accountable for their performance.
The plan included charter schools, but most of the new schools created under it were run by CMSD. These schools, like Campus International High School, MC2STEM and Facing History New Tech, got lots of start-up money from the two foundations that helped draft the plan.
The Cleveland Transformation Alliance was created to be a check on district and charter schools. Initially, it was designed to be able to block low-performing charters, but the state legislature defanged it with a series of law changes that put most of the oversight for charters in the state’s hands. By the time it was disbanded in 2025, the primary work of the organization, which was also struggling financially, was putting together school quality guides.
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What’s different about this effort?
While the Cleveland Plan and Future Ready both aim to bring high-quality school options to Cleveland, part of what’s new about Future Ready’s work is who is funding it and to whom the money is going.
The Cleveland Plan was primarily funded by local foundations, which doled out millions to the district for reforms including breaking up large high schools into smaller, themed academies. Future Ready is funded by City Fund, a national organization that has a strategy of investing in city-based nonprofits which oftentimes bring high quality charter schools to their cities.
“Typically, we have a local nonprofit that’s kind of our anchor partner, and we invest in their strategy for the city,” Forbriger said.
Forbriger was somewhat evasive on the question of whether or not City Fund would describe its work as replicating portfolio-style reforms. “At the end of the day, we want every child to have access to a great school,” she said. (In an interview, Trifiro said Future Ready isn’t pursuing a “top down strategy” like the portfolio model and instead letting what Cleveland parents need guide their work.)
Signal Cleveland reached out to the staff at the two local foundations involved in drafting the Cleveland Plan. They declined to speak on the record for this story.
Leaders of Future Ready’s effort also say they want community and parent voices to play a bigger role in shaping school options in the city than they have in the past. The Cleveland Plan was hashed out by a handful of local organizations but initially excluded the Cleveland Teachers Union. Future Ready insists that their work will be guided by the experiences of students and parents navigating school quality issues. There isn’t currently a robust organization of district parents to advocate on their behalf.
In 2002, both Trifiro and Leah Hudnall, a partner at Future Ready, helped conduct a city-wide listening tour on education, which found a disparity of quality education options across the city, particularly between the East and West sides.
“Do we truly understand what families and children in Cleveland are facing?” Hudnall said. “Eventually our work has to include the people who are the customers of these schools.”
Future Ready is also considering advocating for tighter controls on charter school quality — something that would likely take an act of state law, since lawmakers wrested most of the power from local groups like the Transformation Alliance in 2015. Trifiro’s nonprofit also has an associated 501c4, a kind of nonprofit organization that has more latitude to lobby lawmakers.
What does the research say about how this approach works?
Proponents of the portfolio model will point to districts like New Orleans, Denver and Washington, D.C., as evidence of the model’s success. Other research, however, has found little to no gains in cities like Memphis, which also adopted elements of the strategy.
Measuring the impacts of different school types, including charter schools, is more straightforward. A 2023 national study found that students enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools typically outperform students in traditional public schools.
The case for charter schools also strengthens or weakens depending on what demographic researchers examine. For example, a comprehensive 2019 study of charter schools across Ohio found Black students at charter schools saw greater academic gains than their peers at district schools did. But other groups, like students with disabilities or English language learners, saw fewer gains than their peers enrolled in traditional public schools.
How to measure school quality is also up for debate. Many of the studies looking at charter schools measure effectiveness using test scores, but, for lots of families, factors like school culture are as important as testing. Some national studies have shown charter schools are more likely to suspend students and more likely to engage in discriminatory discipline. Research outside Ohio has also found mixed results when looking at whether the academic benefits of charter schools translate into better long-term outcomes for their students compared to students at traditional public schools.
