CRPE at ASU
A message from CRPE director Robin Lake
I am truly delighted to announce that in early February 2022, the Center on Reinventing Public Education will be affiliating with Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Through this exciting partnership, we will be joining a stimulating community of colleagues who bring rigorous analysis, pragmatism, and an innovation mindset to address the toughest challenges in public education and serve the students most in need of solutions.
We are excited to be part of an institution at the forefront of reinventing education. ASU has been ranked No. 1 for innovation by U.S. News & World Report for seven years running, and its president, Michael Crow, has been a champion of equity and diversity in America’s colleges and universities, insisting that access and excellence are not mutually exclusive.
“Making ASU the new home for the Center on Reinventing Public Education brings into the fold an entity that shares the university’s priority of improving all student outcomes and will be an asset to the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in a number of ways,” Crow said. “Among other things, it will expand ASU’s research capacity, and it will signal our shared commitment with CRPE to a public education system that prepares every student for the challenges of the future. We look forward to closer collaboration.”
As ASU innovates in higher ed, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College aims to do the same for K-12 education. The college, which aims to redesign the education workforce to allow educators to work in more sustainable and effective staffing structures, excels at both educator preparation and scholarship. With its annual research expenditures No. 1 among graduate colleges of education, according to U.S. News & World Report, the college offers CRPE exciting new opportunities for collaboration.
CRPE's work has long been characterized by a sense of urgency and a commitment to trying new approaches and testing their efficacy. That commitment is a perfect fit with our mission to create knowledge, mobilize people, and take action to improve education.
“We are delighted to welcome CRPE as an integral part of our college,” said Carole Basile, dean of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “CRPE’s work has long been characterized by a sense of urgency and a commitment to trying new approaches and testing their efficacy. That commitment is a perfect fit with our mission to create knowledge, mobilize people, and take action to improve education.”
We are grateful to the University of Washington for 27 years of strong partnership. At UW, CRPE continually looked around the corner, positing and testing solutions to meet the needs of students and families, especially the historically marginalized. We employed rigorous research to expose inequities. We challenged all assumptions to ensure U.S. public education prepares every student for a life of citizenship and economic independence.
We will keep doing that important work at ASU. Our great team will continue to advance our existing projects from our main office in Seattle and remotely nationwide. Our contact info will change in February—we’ll be in touch about that.
Our pandemic response demonstrated the value of our commitment to producing actionable research. It has also reinforced the importance of collective action and strong partnerships. Our partnership with ASU will ensure our strength as we track the pandemic’s long-term impact on students, assess our education system’s progress delivering restitution and recovery for all students, and identify and test innovations that will create a more resilient and equitable future.
It’s clear that boundary-spanning, forward-thinking partnerships are necessary if we hope to make good on public education’s promise to this generation, and future generations, of American students. With ASU and our other strategic partners, CRPE is ready.
