District Schools Don’t Always Have to Close—They Can Transform

Our report, Better Together: Ensuring Quality District Schools in Times of Charter Growth and Declining Enrollment, takes an honest look at an urgent problem that has long divided education leaders. To help inform and advance a thoughtful discussion, we invited a number of experts to share their views on this complex and politically charged issue. […]

The Forces Behind Declining Enrollment and a New Way Forward

Our report, Better Together: Ensuring Quality District Schools in Times of Charter Growth and Declining Enrollment, takes an honest look at an urgent problem that has long divided education leaders. To help inform and advance a thoughtful discussion, we invited a number of experts to share their views on this complex and politically charged issue. […]

The charter movement’s “tipping point” strategy isn’t working. What now?

For those in the charter movement who have viewed chartering as a systemic reform strategy (not just an escape hatch for some kids), the prevalent theory of action for the last ten to fifteen years has been a “tipping point” strategy. The idea was to concentrate growth in targeted cities until districts either responded to […]

Returning the Favor: David Osborne Goes Deep in “Reinventing America’s Schools”

22 years ago, I published a RAND report, Reinventing Public Education, urging that all public schools operate under contracts with public officials. (This later grew into a book with the same title written with Larry Pierce and Jim Guthrie.) The core argument came from my earlier studies on school effectiveness—that every public school needed a […]

How Politics Can Enhance the Work of School Reform

I live in Seattle, a deeply “blue,” progressive city. There are a lot of great things about being surrounded by people passionate about public policy and willing to exert their political muscles to fight for the things they care about, whether that may be protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policy or fighting for a higher […]

Evidence Isn’t Enough: Good Policy Needs Good Politics

I’m a researcher at university-based center that prides itself on following the evidence. That means I spend most of my time thinking about “what works.” I’m not alone. Federal and state policymakers, advocacy groups, and philanthropists have spilt a lot of ink on the value of evidence. Because I live and breathe evidence every day, […]

How Denver Is Working to Improve Its Portfolio of Schools

CRPE recently analyzed Denver’s portfolio of public schools—the curricular themes, instructional approaches, and extra programmatic offerings—as part of a new report (it also looked at New Orleans and Washington, D.C.). In this blog, Brian Eschbacher, Executive Director of Planning and Enrollment Services at Denver Public Schools, shares the district’s goals and progress using enrollment data […]

What if Education Policy Were More Like Astronomy? The Value of ‘Soft Power’

As my family heads down to eastern Oregon today to watch the solar eclipse, I can’t help but think about how different things might be if education policy was akin to astronomy. You see, while eclipses are rare events, they are entirely predictable ones—shaped by well understood physical phenomenon like the orbit of the earth […]

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