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Focus Area:
Innovation and the Future of Learning

At CRPE, we study how public education can evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing world. Our research on innovation and the future of learning examines how schools are rethinking teaching and learning models—from personalized and competency-based approaches to the use of technology and AI—to better prepare students for life beyond school. We investigate how these innovations take shape in real contexts, what barriers and enablers schools encounter, and how systems can support sustainable change. Across this work, we aim to understand how schools and communities can design learning environments that are more equitable, adaptable, and responsive to the diverse needs of students.

  • Research Reports    

The Transformation Gap: Why Motivated District Leaders Pursue Incremental Change

Chelsea Waite, Michael Berardino, Maddy Sims

School districts are struggling to create both equitable and fundamentally different outcomes for young people through incremental improvements. The alternative is transformational systems change, when school districts redefine their purpose and operations through a coherent strategy to ensure every school is a high-quality, empowering place for all students to thrive—but this remains rare.

  • Research Reports    

The Reckoning: Addressing Oakland’s Literacy Crisis

Ashley Jochim

Oakland Unified School District has spent the past five years trying to address a severe literacy crisis—one where most Black and Latine students were not reading at grade level.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

Two Connected Paths for School Districts to Thrive in an Era of Enrollment Decline and Heightened Competition

Robin Lake, Travis Pillow

America’s school districts are serving a shrinking share of a shrinking market. The K–12 population is declining overall, families are leaving high-cost cities, homeschooling has expanded since the pandemic, private school enrollment has rebounded, and charter school enrollment continues to grow.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

Special Education Identification: What We Learned from the Unlocking Potential Data Sprint

Ashley Jochim

Fifty years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promised to bridge the gap between what students with disabilities need and what the public education system was designed to provide.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

Special Education Is Broken. Our New Database Can Help Spark Way to Fix It

Ashley Jochim, Alexander Kurz

Advocates who have fought hard battles to preserve the right of children with disabilities to attend public schools have never faced a fight like this one.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

The “Big Blur”: A Renewed Call to Merge High School, College, and Career

Joel Vargas

Imagine a world where every high school junior has walked a factory floor, sat in a boardroom, taken college courses, and earned credentials valued by employers before graduation.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

Smartphones and Absenteeism are Noisy Problems, but the Quiet Crisis in Math Is Instruction

Chelsea Waite

Everyone needs foundational math skills. Numeracy predicts higher earnings, better health, and increased access to fast-growing jobs. Algebra is the gateway to advanced math and to many college and workforce programs.

  • Research Reports    

Virtual 1:1 Literacy Tutoring in Oakland Unified School District: Implementation and Effectiveness of a Pilot at Scale

Mary Laski, Calen Clifton

In 2024–25, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) launched a districtwide pilot of virtual, high-dosage, 1:1 literacy tutoring in partnership with three providers: Hoot, Ignite Reading, and OpenLiteracy.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

Meeting the AI Moment Requires a New Education R&D Infrastructure

Auditi Chakravarty

Depending on where you sit in the education ecosystem, 2025 has felt either deeply discouraging or full of possibility. On one hand, earlier this year, the federal government signaled retreat from its commitment to education research, and just this week, the Trump administration took further steps to dismantle the Department of Education.

  • Blogs    
  • The Lens    

A “Zero-Based Budgeting” Approach for High School Course Requirements in the Age of AI

Mike Petrilli

For better or worse, AI, and especially chatbots associated with Large Language Models, are already changing the daily rhythms of education here and around the world.

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