Alice Opalka is a former research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
Over the past school year, CRPE has tracked how pandemic learning pods evolved from emergency responses to, in some cases, small, innovative, and personalized learning communities.
This brief gives a snapshot of how school districts across the country are currently planning for fall 2020, how they are planning for contingencies of COVID-19 spread, and how this varies based on district characteristics.
Our latest analysis of school district learning models from March 1 to March 13 finds that a clear majority—57 percent—of the nation’s school districts report offering full-time in-person learning.
Our December review of a statistically representative sample of 477 districts found 31 percent are operating in fully remote learning—a larger percentage than at any other point during the fall semester.
Our analysis of district responses nationwide in the spring found many districts that responded quickly used a “tight,” centralized response and strong leadership to set expectations and provide for the basic resource needs for all students.
Gaps in access to the internet and instruction were evident in CRPE’s analysis of rural districts. However, rural districts also devised innovative strategies to help put materials and instruction in the hands of students.
We knew the sudden shift to remote learning would be hard. For the last two months CRPE followed a group of large, mostly urban school systems as they clarified their expectations for teaching students, tracking attendance, and monitoring learning.
Last week, Fairfax County in Virginia delayed the launch of remote learning due to technical challenges. Earlier in the month, Los Angeles Unified School District reported that about one third of their over 600,000 students were not logging into their online learning platforms regularly, and that about 15,000 had been completely absent since online learning began.
This blog is the third in a series reporting on CRPE’s “Big Think Network.” Through this project, CRPE is convening a diverse group of practitioners who are working on a variety of projects, all geared toward the goal of creating a more customized and equitable education system.
The report examines the Texas Education Agency’s System of Great Schools (SGS) initiative, which calls on districts to manage school performance in new ways, expands access to school choice options, and takes a dynamic approach to managing their supply of schools.
This report is the first step in developing an evidence base about how charter schools meet the needs of unique learners, how they can improve in this work, and what aspects of chartering as a governance model support or impede their ability to do so.
An overview of the district-charter collaboration landscape and one strategy that many cities are pursuing: sharing instructional practices across district and charter schools.
Cities across the country are grappling with persistent school segregation. While some argue that public school choice increases the problem, there are ways that cities can use carefully designed school choice initiatives as a vehicle for integrating schools.
This report examines why charter school growth in the San Francisco Bay Area has slowed dramatically and offers solutions for cities nationwide to encourage the development of new high-quality schools.
This report examines how politics shapes the work of district-charter collaboration and offers strategies for district and charter leaders to improve their chances of success.
District budgets are badly strained when many of their schools are under-enrolled. This is one of the biggest reasons that districts with growing charter enrollment hit financial hurdles.
Based on six years of research, this report explores why a growing number of districts and charter schools are choosing to work together, the costs and benefits of different types of cooperation, and the real impacts of successful collaboration on students and families.
CRPE’s new paper focuses on developing a common school performance framework, tool for measuring performance of an individual school using a defined set of metrics that is common to schools across different agencies or governing bodies.
