At CRPE, we study how assessment, accountability, and oversight can strengthen public education while fostering equity, innovation, and continuous improvement. Our research examines how traditional accountability frameworks can narrow teaching and constrain schools’ ability to adapt, and we explore approaches that measure what truly matters for student success—academic growth, deeper learning, and readiness for life beyond school. We also investigate how oversight can balance school autonomy with strong protections for access and quality, ensuring that all students are well served. Across this work, our goal is to inform accountability systems that uphold public trust while enabling schools to innovate and respond to the diverse needs of their communities.
This paper provides the first comprehensive review of the research to date on state interventions, assessing the advantages and limits of five common turnaround approaches and outlining key ingredients for success.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative was designed to solve a problem that has plagued past standard-setting efforts. Many states responded to earlier efforts by watering down their standards for learning and lowering expectations for students in an attempt to artificially boost the number of students that reached proficiency.
The Florida Department of Education has provided two competitive grants to Duval County and Miami-Dade County to foster district-charter collaboration. CRPE research analyst Sean Gill spoke with Adam Emerson, the Florida Department of Education’s charter schools director, about his thoughts on how the collaboration work is progressing.
Education Researcher
Assistant Policy Researcher, RAND
Chairman, Cross & Joftus
Vice Principal, Portland Public Schools
Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Education Researcher
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education, Marquette University
Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Institute Fellow, American Institutes for Research
Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver
Research Analyst