Partnering to Improve Education

Lessons From Charter Schools

By Priscilla Wohlstetter & Joanna Smith

Nearly everyone from education reformers to policymakers and the general public agrees: The public education system needs to improve. The federal No Child Left Behind Act has made this painfully obvious. Two years after its passage, 50 percent of all urban districts and nearly 25 percent of suburban districts have identified at least one school in need of improvement, according to a recent study by the Center on Education Policy. Part of the problem is that public schools lack the knowledge and expertise they need to build capacity to improve themselves.

Over the past several decades, organizations in policy arenas outside of education have built capacity through partnerships in areas as diverse as welfare reform, public health care, transportation, and prison management. Based on the benefits of collective action, nonprofit, for-profit, and public organizations work together to solve problems beyond the capacity of any one organization.

Some traditional public schools have experimented with partnerships, but charter schools have been particularly apt to do so. Charter school operators experience operational challenges that often push them into forming partnerships, and laws in many states encourage such outside involvement. Also, exemptions from many district and state regulations enable charter schools to seek partnerships more readily than traditional schools can. If there were a precedent for using partnerships to build capacity, it would be found in charter schools. Thus, we studied their approach to see what...