What Is the Sum of the Parts? How Federal, State and District Funding Streams Confound Efforts to Address Different Student Types
This report demonstrates in greater detail than ever before how America’s methods of school finance work against a single-minded focus on student learning.
Closing Troubled Schools
This report analyzes the main reasons charter authorizers close schools, and how districts can use those closures as part of an overall improvement strategy that aligns with and reinforces their core values.
Is it Better to be Good or Lucky? Decentralized Teacher Selection in 10 Elementary Schools
This working paper presents results from a qualitative field study of school-based hiring—one of the more foundational ideas for reforming centralized and bureaucratic human resource management (HRM) systems.
Community Colleges and Higher Education: How Do State Transfer and Articulation Policies Impact Student Pathways?
This paper reviews state cross-institutional policies designed to better integrate community colleges with four-year college and university system schools, and examines how patterns of college attendance, transfer, and degree earning vary across states with different policies.
School Funding’s Tragic Flaw
This paper finds that federal, state, and local policies designed to distribute education funds systematically provide more money to higher-income students and wealthier schools.
Brief: Allocation Anatomy: District Resource Distribution Practices & Reform Strategies
A companion piece to Allocation Anatomy: How District Policies That Deploy Resources Can Support (or Undermine) District Reform Strategies, this research brief summarizes the report’s key findings and recommendations.
Allocation Anatomy: How District Policies That Deploy Resources Can Support (or Undermine) District Reform Strategies
This paper explores the nature of micro-budgeting decisions and shows how they support or hamper district reform strategies. It also provides a framework to help district leaders recognize different kinds of allocations.
Buying Smart in Thin Markets: District Tactics to Improve the Quality and Quantity of Autonomous Schools
This paper identifies tactics districts can use to influence the factors that shape the supply and quality of providers of autonomous schools in thin markets.
Working With Private Partners to Manage the Market: Collaborative Approaches to Charter School Oversight
This paper finds that informal partnerships between authorizers and private organizations have the potential to improve the quality and quantity of new schools.
In the Eye of the Beholder: Charter Schools and Innovation
This paper summarizes the research evidence on charter school innovation to date and suggests ways to more productively pursue future research and development in the charter sector.