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Seeking Common Ground: Early Lessons in District-Charter School Collaboration
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Seeking Common Ground: Early Lessons in District-Charter School Collaboration

Published: Aug 31, 2015
Publisher: Washington, DC: Mathematica Policy Research
Human Services Education School Choice and Charters

Associated Project

Evaluation of the District-Charter Collaboration Grants

Time frame: 2013-2016

Prepared for:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Authors

Moira McCullough

Luke Heinkel

Betsy Keating

Key Findings

Key Findings:

  • Establishing purposeful school partnerships, particularly among two or more schools located in the same building, spurred collaboration when leaders were invested in all students in the building, not just those from their own schools.
  • Stronger working relationships emerged among central office administrators at the highest levels, but rifts and skepticism about systemic change remained among other staff.
  • Intensive training and residency programs for school leaders helped facilitate sharing of best practices in areas such as teaching English-language skills, working with students with disabilities, small-group instruction, teacher coaching, and strategic data use. But some schools involved in the study often had not progressed to implementing these shared practices.

Mathematica has been studying the implementation of Bill & Melinda Gates–funded district-charter collaboration grants since July 2013. In this report, we examine the grantees’ activities from December 2012 through winter 2013–2014, focusing on the direct participants in the collaborations. The main goal of the analysis was to understand whether and how collaboration—and the sharing of effective practices, in particular—was occurring on a small scale. Collecting and analyzing data from semistructured interviews with central office administrators and school principals, teacher focus groups, and observations, Mathematica found that several activities implemented in multiple sites show promise in spreading effective practices across schools and staff, but overall progress in increasing collaboration has been limited.

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