All Site Content

Sponsoring Charters: A Resource Guide for Minnesota Chartering Agencies. (pdf)

This is a step-by-step analysis of sponsoring, from the decision to sponsor through the stages of public information, application review and contract development. It covers how to assist and oversee the school, down to the point of charter renewal. Since sponsoring (authorizing) is a new concept in most states, it is important to define organizational responsibilities. This clarifies the relationships and duties of the state department of education, the sponsor and the board of the chartered school. It explains a new way a sponsor can produce a new schools: This is the 'Sponsor-Initiated School'. Rather than wait for a proposal to be submitted to it, the sponsor determines the types of schools it wants to have created; then requests proposals from around the country (or around the world). The sponsor then selects from the very best proposals and awards them chartered school status.

Standards for Quality Sponsoring of Chartered Schools. (pdf)

This guide and self-evaluation rubric is intended to identify the indicators for quality charter school sponsoring in Minnesota, specify the criteria that defines each indicator, identify the incentives for why a sponsor would want to meet the quality sponsoring indicators, and develop a process by which sponsors can ascertain whether they are meeting these quality indicators.

States are creating a non-district sector of public education. (pdf)

Essentially with chartering the states are creating a new sector within the framework of public education—different both from the district sector and from private education. This graphic shows the two sectors of public education, as distinguished from private education.

States Will Have to Withdraw the Exclusive. (pdf)

Written as Minnesota was in the early stages of thinking about what would a year later become the first chartering law, this paper zeroed in on "the exclusive franchise" as the heart of the K-12 system-problem. No change, no major improvement in learning, was realistically possible, Kolderie said, until the states withdrew the guarantee of success—for the districts and for the people in them—created by the public-utility arrangement traditional in public education.

Staying In!! Youth on the path to quitting school explain why motivation is central to learning and graduating. (pdf)

"Staying In!!" examines the experiences of some youths who quit school, were attending a school with a low graduation rate, or were on the path to quitting. It describes their human, and democratic, desire to choose whether or not they will learn. Once engaged, they do learn better. It finds that different things motivate different students to choose learning; that no one factor is likely to motivate all students to learn well. It’s possible that states now doing best with motivation are those allowing for the creation of new and fundamentally different schools, advancing customization in addition to high standards for learning.

Students as Allies in Improving Their Schools: A project of What Kids Can Do and MetLife Foundation. (link)

In many classrooms across the country students speak of being barely visible,while just as many teachers struggle merely to get kids to show up—a symptom of a persistent divide, pitting teachers and students on seemingly opposing sides. Student researchers take on these negative dynamics.

Students inform legislators: What's important to understand about chartered schools and what motivates student learning? (pdf)

At the Charter School Student Summit held in St. Paul in December 2004, students discussed the growth and challenges facing the charter movement nationally and reflected on Dr. Howard Fuller’s theory that there can be greater capacity to achieve needed change in public education via chartered schools. Students also discussed their own experiences in chartered schools and exchanged their ideas for improvement of the sector. At the end of the summit, evaluations asked students to inform legislators about chartered schools and what motivates them to learn. Their feedback is summarized in this document.

Students object to standardized testing: Sampling of articles supports using other learning measures. (pdf)

While many students take standardized tests to meet graduation requirements, or simply because they’re told by adults that they must take the test, some conscientious objectors have emerged. This document summarizes their reasons, as reported in an admittedly unscientific sampling of newspaper articles from across the nation (all of which can be downloaded in the standards & testing section of our links page).

Students Respond: Should K-12 Policy By Redirected Toward Innovation? (HTML)

E|E asserts that student motivation is critically relevant to K-12 policy. The country has radically changed the assignment to its schools. A system earlier told to expand access to learning is now told it must ensure that students learn. But, what do young people think of E|E's assertion? Here is an overview of five students' responses.

Stunning advances in digital electronics

Rapidly in recent years the cost of information technology has been falling while the storage-capacity and the speed-of-processing have been rising. The numbers, the rate of improvement, are just astonishing. Yet the conventional approach to improving schooling scarcely looks this direction. It is time now to capture this potential.

Teacher Cooperatives in Education Next

Twenty years ago, when the late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed the notion of innovative schools operating outside conventional district bureaucracies, his aim was to put teachers at the helm. “If you want to hold teachers accountable,” he posited, “then teachers have to be able to run the school.” In the Spring 2009 Education Next, Beth Hawkins explores how some teachers are realizing his vision with the teacher professional partnership model championed by Education|Evolving.

Teacher Partnerships and Teacher Unions. (pdf)

A teacher from Milwaukee describes for the Teacher Union Reform Network the arrangement in Milwaukee—a variation on Wisconsin's chartering law—that gives a partnership of professional teachers full authority and responsibility for the school while protecting both the teachers and the union on the economic front.

Teacher Professional Partnerships: A Different Way to Help Teachers and Teaching. (pdf)

It clearly is possible to organize K-12 education on a professional model. Teachers could have and should have the option to work if they wish—as many architects and engineers and consults and accountants and lawyers and doctors do—with colleagues, in a professional group which they collectively own, with the administrators working for them.

An up-to-date version of the inventory of Teacher Professional Partnerships is maintained online here.

Teacher Professional Partnerships: Books and Media Source List. (pdf)

Several articles and book-chapters have written up the teacher partnership/cooperative idea. Click here for an HTML version of this document, with links to several of the resources.

Teacher-ownership as entrepreneurship in public education. (pdf)

Ted Kolderie gave this paper, "Teacher-Ownership as Entrepreneurship in Public Education," to a symposium at UCLA. In it, he states that teachers could own their work; could manage, or arrange for the management of, a department of a high school, a discrete school, a program district-wide. The text appears in a special issue of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education (IJEE) Volume 2. To purchase this edited volume visit the Senate Hall website at www.senatehall.com. Once on the Senate Hall Web site, click "entrepreneurship" on the navigation bar.

Teachers as Leaders: Short on Power, Long on Responsibility

To upgrade teacher quality, schools need to go beyond just holding teachers more accountable. They need to give teachers more control.

Teachers as Owners. Purchase full book at Amazon.com.

An early (2002) introduction to the idea of the professional model for school-organization.

Teachers in Professional Practice: An inventory of new opportunities for teachers (Second Edition). (pdf)

This 2006 inventory of existing and developing teacher professional partnerships (TPPs) documents growing interest in a professional model of teaching. The inventory describes several teacher professional partnership models, offering a useful overview of the many ways in which teacher partnerships are organizing and functioning.

Teachers propose eliminating 31 jobs to improve their pay in Forest Lake. (pdf)

A newspaper reporter discovered a letter from the union to the board of education, offering to sacrifice 31 teachers' jobs in order to generate revenue for the salary settlement.

Tech-savvy students stuck in text-dominated schools: A summary of available research on student attitudes, perceptions, and behavior. (pdf)

"Tech Savvy..." summarizes available literature reporting student attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors when it comes to using digital technology, particularly for learning. The report describes our nation's increasingly tech-savvy students and the various ways in which they use computers and the Internet. It outlines students' frustrations with our still-text-dominated schools. Students suggest how education policy and school designers could better meet their needs.

The Aims of Education (1929)

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.

The Case for Decentralized Management. (pdf)

Notes from a workshop on school-based management. Ron Hubbs, former chairman and CEO of a major insurance company, tries to explain to superintendents why it really is better to let people closer to the working-level make most of the decisions. There's an astonishing response from one superintendent present.

The current theory of action contains a critical flaw

The current national strategy took both the arrangement of the K-12 institution and the traditional concept of school as given; assumed the problem was a 'performance' problem, and looked to a new framework of accountability—regulation—to get the institution and the schools to do-better. But it might be that the problem is, instead, a 'design' problem and that both the institution and the traditional concept of 'school' need fundamental change.

The emergence of an ‘Open Sector’ in urban education. (pdf)

The ‘Open Sector’ discussed in Ted Kolderie’s book—and in Joe Graba’s talks—is not just a theory of change, although it is that. The "Open Sector" is a reality, as new public schools appear outside the traditional district framework. In a few places districts themselves are proactively creating new independent public schools—in competition with the schools they own and directly run. This policy brief rounds up "Open Sector" activity in 17 major urban communities across the country.

The Importance of Incentives and Rewards in Education. (pdf)

Albert Shanker said when visiting Saint Paul’s ‘Saturn’ school in 1991: “People in other fields dislike change too. But they have to do it. We in education don’t. Because for us nothing is at stake.” The absence of an internal dynamic for change is what has led so many of the advocates for improvement to mandates. Frustrated, they fall back on the idea that we can make kids learn well and can make teachers teach well. Perhaps it might be better to find what is blocking change inside K-12, and to change that.

The national government 'acts' by tying regulations to its grants-in-aid. This has not always worked well.

K-12 education exists in state law; cannot be reached by Congressional legislation or by action of the President. Typically, in these areas of domestic policy, the national government tries to 'do things' by tying requirements to its grants-in-aid. This approach has failed, in the past; as in the 1960s when the national government tried to take control of urban and metropolitan development. Ted Kolderie told the story in his book: Creating the Capacity for Change.

The Other Half of the Strategy: Following Up on System Reform by Innovating with School and Schooling. (pdf)

System-level reforms like standards, accountability, choice and chartering make it more necessary and more possible for schools to succeed with learning. But these reforms do not by themselves affect achievement. Kids learn from what they read, see, hear and do. So success in the effort at improvement requires capitalizing now on the system-level changes with a major effort to create new forms of school and schooling. Those who prefer conventional school should be able to stay with conventional school. But the traditional must not suppress the innovative. The strategy beyond NCLB should be such a 'split screen' strategy, transforming K-12 gradually as new models gradually replace the old models of school.

The Valley Crossing school as a precedent for contracting. (pdf)

Three local districts in Minnesota’s metropolitan suburbs share an elementary school didn't build, don’t own and don’t themselves staff. The Valley Crossing school is a kind of virtual organization; a fascinating case in the use of contracts.

TPP 21: Teacher Professional Partnerships for the 21st Century

TPP21 is a new venture to provide assistance to teachers, school districts, and states to help them understand, support, and implement teacher professional partnerships. Interested? Contact us at teacherpartnerships@educationevolving.org.

Transforming the Classroom

Students in most schools are still arrayed in neat rows of desks, all oriented to a focal point where a teacher will provide the content of the day. This situation is not fair nor realistic. By allowing schooling to be, in most places, confined to the traditional classroom model, we are condemning up to half of our children to not reaching their potential. The only chance we have to reach all–even most–of today's youth is through radical personalization of learning.