Crossing the chasm: How one district is moving its innovative staffing model from pilot to mainstream
This blog is part of our series profiling three school systems several years into implementing workforce innovations or strategic staffing solutions. Scaling up innovations within school systems is a notoriously difficult process. While new instructional approaches or staffing strategies may catch on within a few classrooms or schools, they often fail to become integrated system-wide. […]
Leader-to-leader collaboration: Real talk, real results
This past November was a dream come true for The Oakland REACH—and for me as a leader. For two days, leaders from Rochester, Birmingham, New Orleans, Greenville, Jacksonville, Providence, Boston, and San Francisco, Richmond, and Oakland, CA, gathered together for our first-ever REACH Way Institute (RWI).
These leaders represented the opportunity to impact 350,000 students. I still cannot find the right words to express how much it meant to have groups from all over the country come to learn—not just from us, but from one another. We built an instant community that affirmed just how critical leader collaboration is.
If we’re serious about pandemic recovery, we need summer school at scale
For everyone committed to educational equality, an ambitious new analysis from researchers at Stanford and Harvard today brings grim news. In most states studied, the gap in student achievement between low-income and high-income districts grew dramatically between 2019 and 2023, in many cases by a half-grade or more. We have long known that student performance […]
Breaking the teaching mold—with help from the teachers union
This blog is part of a three-part series profiling school systems that have been implementing workforce innovations or strategic school staffing models for several years. Through innovative and strategic school staffing solutions, efforts to reimagine the teacher workforce have grown over the past several years. This is in response to prolonged teacher shortages and consistently […]
The passing of Linda Brown and the elephant in the room
The school reform community has lost one of its brightest lights. Linda Brown is dead at 81. I met Linda in 1993 at the dawn of the public charter school movement. Her unrelenting commitment to excellence in urban schools inspired my work through the decades, and I was fortunate to serve for years as board […]
School choice: Vital, but not automatic
Post-pandemic America is in a heyday for school choice, at least in red states. From Florida to Ohio to Arizona, parents can get new state subsidies via education savings accounts (ESAs) to choose extracurricular activities, support homeschooling, or pay at least partial tuition in private schools. Elected officials and advocates behind these new supports for […]
2024: Reflecting on 30 years of CRPE
Happy New Year! With the start of 2024, we kick off a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. For me, this anniversary is personal. I have been with CRPE nearly all 30 years—the majority of my life. It has been a true privilege. Humble Beginnings CRPE began with a simple […]
The rise of unconventional teaching roles: How do educators in these roles feel about them?
Many are talking about ways to rethink the role of teaching these days, whether by reorganizing teachers into teams, leveraging community educators, or allowing teachers to teach in unconventional school models like micro-schools. In the past, the motivation to experiment with new staffing models was sometimes in response to teacher labor shortages, teacher burnout, or […]
ChatGPT turns one today: Seven reasons why education leaders should step up on AI
It’s been a year since OpenAI released ChatGPT. Educators (and the rest of the world) were caught off guard by this new technology that could write college essays, plan vacations, and even compose a new poem or song based on the style of an original author. As we said back in May, “This changes everything.” […]
A reality check on the community school dream
No shortage of ideas abound about how to address post-pandemic learning loss, mental health problems and low school attendance. But the best-sounding ideas may make demands on schools and other public agencies that they often can’t meet. Both high-dose tutoring and learning acceleration generated enthusiastic support when schools reopened in 2021. However teachers who were […]