An overview of the district-charter collaboration landscape and one strategy that many cities are pursuing: sharing instructional practices across district and charter 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.
When a career school district educator takes a position leading a charter school, her former district colleagues say, “She’s gone to the dark side.” And when a charter leader is offered a position in a district, she thinks, “How can I work with an office full of incompetent people?” Yet these “boundary spanners” quickly realize that assumptions about the mores or the capacity of the people they would be working with were as pervasive as they were unfounded.
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.
This study explores families’ experiences choosing and enrolling in schools using the new Camden Enrollment, and provides recommendations for improvements to the system.
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.
This paper looks at why many cities have missed opportunities to create more lasting relationships between their district and charter sectors, and offers suggestions for fostering stronger partnerships that could help improve outcomes for all of the students in their cities.
Charter schools have come under fire recently around student discipline. As someone who spent a decade working with children at the tragic end of the school-to-prison pipeline, I’m deeply concerned about the real-world ramifications of suspensions and expulsions on students.
Michelle King, the new superintendent at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), has been on a listening tour. A 30-plus year veteran of the district who has risen from the teacher ranks, King wants to connect with parents and share her plans for the district, then hear their concerns—standard practice for an incoming schools’ chief.
Last month, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute put out talking points on six education issues for the 2016 presidential candidates. A number of these positions—strong accountability, parent choice, paying attention to our poor standing globally, and providing instruction on civics—enjoy support from all sides of the political spectrum.
Listen in as two successful superintendents discuss an under-the-radar trend in school district hiring practices – the bold move to fill high-level central office positions with leaders from the charter sector.
This interim report details the first two years of district-charter collaboration in 16 Compact cities, including lessons learned and potential opportunities and challenges ahead.
Working closely with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s (CMSD) CEO, the school board, and the philanthropic and business community, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson has placed the improvement of educational options of the city’s 50,000 public school students high on his list of second-term priorities.
This case study of the implementation of Baltimore City Public Schools’ portfolio strategy explores how the district’s reform work aligns with CRPE’s definition of the portfolio strategy and how it compares to the approaches taken in other districts.
In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants in Washington State, where researchers found that districts and schools are using the grants for only marginal change.
This essay was written for the PIE Network 5th Annual Policy Summit, September 2011. The authors argue that states can maximize their support for turnaround work by pushing for bold, workable plans, providing technical assistance, helping districts find and train leaders, and offering political cover for tough decisions.
This brief analyzes Seattle’s school 2009-2010 performance levels, how performance varies across the city, and how access to high-performing schools varies across demographic groups.
This brief demonstrates how, contrary to common worry, closing Title I’s “comparability provision” loophole would not force districts to mandatorily reassign teachers.