We can all see where the good jobs are going. By 2025, there will be 25 million digital jobs in this country – more than manufacturing and construction combined. This means that there’s no other...
CRPE studied these efforts to determine how leaders can overcome the challenges of working across traditionally competitive boundaries. When done well, collective action can lead to tangible results:
For Charter Schools:
For School Districts:
For the Community:
CRPE’s studies on district-charter relationships focused most closely on 23 cities with District-Charter Collaboration Compacts supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Between 2011 and 2017, under a grant from the Foundation, we regularly interviewed leaders in school districts, charter schools, and support organizations to track progress on these agreements, reported on local political, legal, and financial barriers to collaboration, and facilitated networking and problem-solving between cities. In January 2017 we published our seminal study, Bridging the District-Charter Divide to Help More Students Succeed. In cities with size-able charter school student populations, we concluded that cross-sector policy coordination is a necessity, not a nicety. However, despite the urgent need, cooperation on common issues was too often treated as a time-limited, forced marriage rather than as a sustained effort and long-term relationship. This study built upon our 2013 interim assessment of 16 Compact Cities.
Our reports include:
Many of CRPE’s other reports offer examples of district-charter cooperation, including:
We can all see where the good jobs are going. By 2025, there will be 25 million digital jobs in this country – more than manufacturing and construction combined. This means that there’s no other...
Charters and traditional schools are often portrayed as at odds with each other. But this collaboration shows that isn’t always the case—and it shows promise for the future.
Robin Lake is quoted in this New York Times article on whether teachers should be rated according to their students’ success on standardized exams.
Robin Lake is quoted in Chalkbeat about former Denver Public Schools superintendent Tom Boasberg, who encouraged reform through close collaboration between district and charter schools.
Paymon Rouhanifard has been the superintendent of Camden City Public Schools in New Jersey since 2013 when the district was put under state receivership. Camden still has a long way to go, but the changes...
For more than a year, the U.S. Secretary of Education and the president of the American Federation of Teachers have been engaged in a bitter dispute about the public and private purposes of education in...
I recently wrote an essay explaining fundamental flaws in a paper by Gordon Lafer, a professor and longtime labor union analyst who published through an Oakland, California–based think tank called In the Public Interest. I...
An overview of the district-charter collaboration landscape and one strategy that many cities are pursuing: sharing instructional practices across district and charter schools.
A 15-minute drive from the Alamo, Ira C. Ogden Elementary School is in its first year of an ambitious turnaround effort. At the beginning of March, as part of CRPE’s 15th Portfolio Network Meeting, I...
The many big cities now looking for school superintendents—Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Newark, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., among them—need to pay attention to what has happened in Chicago. Like Chicago, these districts face big...
Current Research
Previous Research
