Concern about the state of literacy instruction in America's classrooms has recently exploded. As a result, policymakers, school system leaders, and teachers have increasingly sought to remake how children learn to read in order to improve literacy outcomes--a pursuit that has gained heightened urgency in the aftermath of the pandemic. This work,…

During the spring of 2020, two months into the global COVID-19 pandemic, four leading CBOs in Boston--the YMCA of Greater Boston, Latinos For Education (LFE), Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), and The BASE--came together to discuss what they can do to help underserved children in the city experiencing education disruption. In response to the…

This report is part of the American School District Panel (ASDP), a joint project between the Center on Reinventing Public Education, the RAND Corporation, Chiefs for Change, the Council of Great City Schools, and Kitamba, an education consulting firm. The ASDP's primary work is conducting a series of nationally-representative surveys of school…

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has been studying the four-day school week since 2015. Since then, the phenomenon of the four-day school week has spread into non-rural areas and interest appears to be growing. Given these apparent changes, the author wanted to know more about recent trends in the initiative. As districts continue…

In 2017 the Texas Education Agency (TEA) launched the Systems of Great Schools (SGS) initiative. With a combination of incentives and capacity building, SGS attempts to transform how school districts approach school improvement. It calls on districts to manage school performance in new ways, expand access to school choice options, and take a…

There is wide recognition that supporting social-emotional learning (SEL) is a critical task for schools as they emerge from the pandemic, but implementation is challenging and SEL programs can easily turn into isolated and disjointed initiatives. When schools treat SEL as an isolated initiative, implementation can be uneven and difficult to…

Barriers to summer enrichment and learning experiences reinforce gaps in resources and opportunities in public education that face students from lower-income households. In a growing number of cities, new support structures are emerging to help parents overcome barriers to summer enrichment and learning for their children. These supports provide…

This guide was created to help district leaders understand the benefits and drawbacks of the four-day school week, assess their district's readiness to make the switch, and evaluate the results of implementing the new schedule. This guide begins with an overview of common goals and outcomes for the four-day school week. It then provides a set of…

The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) conducted a multiyear, multimethod effort to learn how school districts, charter schools, and regional partners can support the successful implementation, expansion, and sustainability of personalized learning (PL) in schools. The vision for PL is to tailor instruction to individual students'…

The portfolio strategy is a change strategy for public education in a district or metropolitan area. It is founded on the idea of re-missioning government agencies from rigid bureaucratic entities that mostly manage compliance requirements and interest group politics to a new role: overseeing performance and a diverse range of school choices…

In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion nationwide to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. The U.S. Department of Education intended for the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to spur dramatic change. This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants…

Bringing charters to scale remains a major challenge. To learn more about barriers to the expansion of high-quality public charter schools and how they might be removed, the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP) at the University of Washington and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools convened a meeting of leaders from…

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has launched a new initiative entitled "Doing School Choice Right." Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates, Annie E. Casey, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations, the initiative's goal is to help state and local leaders handle practical issues whose resolution can determine whether school…