Purpose: This study examines how district governance and different school contexts in Denver's portfolio management model affect shared leadership for learning. We define this as shared influence on instructional leadership and school-wide decision making, which research suggests have strong ties to student achievement and teacher commitment.…

Employing an institutional logics framework and critical discourse analysis, this study examines the discourse of participants in a stakeholder-feedback meeting about a proposal by the Denver Public School board to extend collective bargaining rights to teachers in the district's innovation schools. The findings provide insight into the logics…

The UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership (CUEL) brief is an analysis that examines schools that have historically struggled to improve within the context of the Chicago Public Schools SQRP Accountability System. In this research brief, CUEL researchers advance the term 'high churn" to describe a school type that has proven particularly…

The aim of this brief is to describe a key contributor to the persistent disparities found in student learning outcomes in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and to show how this knowledge can help identify specific sources of inequities in CPS, particularly for schools with predominantly Black student enrollments. The authors present a data-based…

Our 2022-23 Fordham Sponsorship Annual Report shares our work during the last school year, overseeing thirteen schools that served approximately 6,000 students in Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati and Portsmouth, Ohio. We value this opportunity to keep stakeholders and the public informed about our efforts, provide information on each of the schools we…

Research indicates that preparation programs featuring partnerships between universities and districts have a greater impact on career advancement of graduates than more conventional university-based programs. The University of Denver's (DU) Ritchie Program for School Leaders has been identified as a "model" of university-district…

Teachers are increasingly dissatisfied. In one recent survey, 47 percent of teachers said they were not enthusiastic about their jobs, and another showed a sharp drop in teacher satisfaction since 2008, from 62 to 39 percent. This dissatisfaction does not stem from what one might think--stresses related to dealing with students and families.…

This critical ethnography utilizes critical policy analysis and a theoretical understanding of neoliberal racism to examine the practiced reality of school choice in a public, under-resourced, and historically underperforming neighborhood elementary school attended predominantly by Latina/o/x students. Despite improvement initiatives that resulted…

School performance frameworks (SPFs) are action-oriented information tools that provide information on school performance and quality across a variety of measures. SPFs have evolved as a solution for local communities to make sense of an array of student, school, and system performance data, and to support transparent and equitable decisions. SPFs…

The latest edition of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's sponsorship annual report highlights our work during the 2021-22 school year, overseeing twelve schools that served 5,500 students in four Ohio cities. We value this opportunity to keep stakeholders and the public informed about our efforts, and provide information on each of the schools…

In 2017, Matthew Chingos and Kristin Blagg of the Urban Institute convened a group of researchers to analyze students' school choices and travel to school in five cities-- Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, and Washington, D.C.--where families are able to select from among many charter and district schools. The team found that a large number…

As winter swept across the United States at the outset of 2018, ushering in the bitterest and bleakest days of the year, American teachers and their unions had little to celebrate. The first eight years of the decade had exacted a heavy toll, and still more trouble was lurking on the horizon. In the wake of the Great Recession, funding for public…

Does ''choosing a home'' still matter for ''choosing a school,'' despite implementation of school choice policies designed to weaken this link? Prior research shows how the presence of such policies does little to solve the problems of stratification and segregation associated with residentially based enrollment systems, since families differ…

School practices and policies are often influenced by various research, nonprofit, for-profit, and philanthropic organizations. To help understand their influence, this article provides a framework accounting for the variety of school improvement organizations (SIOs) and summarizes debates regarding their benefits and risks. I cluster SIOs as…

The discussion of enrollment of students with disabilities in charter schools focuses on fundamental questions related to equal access and has not typically explored the quality of special education programming available. However, absent quality support and services, access to charter schools is essentially a hollow promise. This report examines…