ERIC Number: ED426136
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1998-May
Pages: 27
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Making Matches That Make Sense: Opportunities and Strategies for Linking Charter Schools and Comprehensive School Design Organizations.
Hassel, Bryan; Hassel, Emily
The premise of this policy paper is that two educational movements, the charter school movement and the development and dissemination of a variety of comprehensive school designs, have an unprecedented opportunity to work together to improve U.S. public education. This paper, focusing on challenges facing comprehensive school design organizations, uses dozens of interviews with representatives of school design groups, charter school leaders, and charter school resource centers to analyze the challenges in forging more links between charter schools and school design organizations. The primary challenges facing comprehensive school design groups working with charter schools are marketing, start-up problems, and the challenges posed by the relatively small scale of the individual charter school. Overarching strategies to address the problems of partnerships between comprehensive school design groups and charter schools include early contact with charter schools, the identification of markets for charter schools, and the identification of ways to capitalize on the respective strengths of the schools and the design groups. To address marketing challenges specifically, design groups should focus on outreach partnerships and marketing. To address the challenges of start-up, design groups should develop or identify low-cost tools to help them find promising candidates for collaboration, and they should explore creative funding options. Challenges related to the small scale of charter schools can be approached through clustering of schools using particular designs, shifting the balance of assistance by lowering the intensity of the intervention, and exploring ways to subsidize assistance to some charter schools in exchange for their willingness to be "lighthouses" or laboratories for designs. (SLD)
Descriptors: Charter Schools, Educational Change, Educational Policy, Elementary Secondary Education, Integrated Activities, Marketing, Partnerships in Education, Program Development, School Choice, School Restructuring, School Size, Urban Schools
Charter Friends National Network, 1355 Pierce Butler Route, Suite 100, St. Paul, MN 55104; Tel: 612-644-5270; Fax: 612-645-0240; :e-mail: info@charterfriends.org; Web site: http://www.charterfriends.org
Publication Type: Guides - Non-Classroom
Education Level: N/A
Audience: Practitioners
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: Charter Friends National Network, St. Paul, MN.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A