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Central Falls, Rhode Island may seem like an unlikely standard bearer for a reading or public school revolution - it is the poorest district in the state with more than 85% of its students on free or reduced lunch plans. And, the city itself recently went bankrupt. Yet, a remarkable collaboration between The Learning Community charter school and surrounding non-charter public elementary schools continues to demonstrate that students are hungry to learn and that, in the words of The Learning Community credo, poverty is not a barrier to success.  The collaboration is part of what is called the Growing Readers Initiative - an effort to share best practices between teachers from different systems to turnaround some of the lowest reading scores in the state.

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

Central Falls, though, also has one of the most promising reading experiments in the country. The Learning Community, a local charter school, and the Central Falls public elementary schools have joined forces in a collaboration that has resulted in dramatic improvements in the reading scores of the public schoolchildren from kindergarten to grade 2. Given the mistrust of charter schools by public schoolteachers, creating this collaboration was no small feat. And while the city's bankruptcy now threatens it, the Central Falls experiment not only needs to be preserved, it should be replicated across the country. I haven't seen anything that makes more sense.

What effective CMOs do rely on heavily is trust, relationships, and clear communication. In well-run charters, there is a common belief about teaching and learning, and teachers are hired and retained based on whether they share that belief. Teachers know they are getting ongoing feedback and no surprises. They know that the principal doing their observations and evaluations is a master teacher operating on the same definition of good instruction as they are. They know that every other teacher in the building is a potential collaborator. In other words, they trust their coworkers and operate in a culture of common understanding and mutual respect. Evaluation is understood to be more about organizational improvement than about passing judgment on an individual. In fact, some CMOs have tried and dumped merit pay because they felt it disrupted this collaborative culture.

By now, you have seen the latest Metlife Survey of the American Teacher. It shows that teachers' satisfaction with their job has plummeted since 2009, from 59 percent to 44 percent. It is the lowest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of teachers who are likely to leave the profession has grown from 17 percent to 29 percent since 2009. The reasons are obvious: The most satisfied teachers feel their jobs are secure, and they are treated as professionals by the community. Compared with dissatisfied teachers, they are more likely to have opportunities for professional development, time to collaborate with other teachers, and greater parental involvement in their schools. These are teachers working in an atmosphere of professionalism and collaboration.

As a party to the agreement (I was personally at the table throughout the negotiations), NYSUT sought to maintain principles that are good for students and fair to teachers. We believe we succeeded. This agreement creates a thoughtful, collaborative framework that allows teachers, principals and parents to develop a majority of the evaluation measures through conversation and negotiation. It recognizes the complexities involved in teacher evaluation and emphasizes the continual improvement of teaching skills in ways that benefit all children. At a time when poverty and the wealth gap widen the achievement gap, this agreement strives to strengthen public education by building on collaboration to help every child succeed.

"Parent involvement in education is widely recognized as important, yet it remains weak in many communities. One important reason for this weakness is that urban schools have grown increasingly isolated from the families and communities they serve. Many of the same neighborhoods with families who are disconnected from public schools, however, often contain strong community-based organizations (CBOs) with deep roots in the lives of families. Many CBOs are beginning to collaborate with public schools, and these collaborations might potentially offer effective strategies to engage families more broadly and deeply in schools."

Despite increasing evidence that collaboration is one of the keys to a school's success in improving student performance and closing achievement gaps, policymakers at national and state levels, including New York, are moving toward teacher evaluation systems that attempt to attribute student progress to the efforts of individual teachers.

Last February, two very different narratives played out in Denver and Madison. In Madison, political vandals tried to take out one of the state's great civic institutions: public sector unions. Unions were radically reduced in their capacity to bring the wisdom of the practitioner voice to policy. They were loaded down with legal requirements designed to hobble them with an obsession with mere survival. They lost legal rights to speak for workers in any meaningful way. We know the story: it was big news. In Denver, overshadowed by events in Madison, the US Department of Education convened a Labor-Management Collaboration Conference. Here, a very different narrative played out. Unions were treated not as enemies to be destroyed, but as valued partners in the policy process. Twelve districts that had collaboratively integrated their union voice, and twelve locals who had responded with care and creativity were highlighted as models. Over 150 districts sent teams of administrators, political leaders, and union leaders to learn from these twelve districts.

Boston, Central Falls, R.I., and Sacramento, Calif. will join a handful of other of other school systems to receive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to set up collaborative relationships with charter schools within their borders, the Seattle-based philanthropy announced today.

The party line for advocates of online learning is that virtual and brick-and-mortar schools should work collaboratively to find the best learning solutions for every student, which may or may not look like a traditional classroom experience. But in many places, the fiscal realities of state policy in a down economy can pit potential collaborators against each other.

A rare collaboration between charter schools and traditional public schools will expand to five more urban schools next year. The Learning Community, a charter school for kindergarten through eighth grade serving primarily low-income children from Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence, is receiving $1.8 million to expand its nationally recognized reading program, free of charge to the selected Rhode Island schools.

Public discussion about school reform often positions charter schools and district schools in opposition to each other; if you're in favor of one, you're against the other. But the Annenberg Institute has found that in what we call a "smart district," charters can work with district schools to provide a laboratory for new ideas that can be scaled up to benefit all of the district's schools.

Led by the vision of the Council of Chief State School Officers and nine participating states, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, the collaborative aims to create a shared technology infrastructure that works better and costs less per state than what can be accomplished by each state working individually.

...But Baiz would be the first to admit that his story isn't about star power. Indeed, Baiz's experience is a case study in the importance of collaboration and team work in achieving constant improvement both in teaching and in the overall results for kids. It is also an object lesson in how both TDRs and traditional teacher evaluations can serve to undermine those goals.

In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaborations that strengthen skills, competence, and a school's overall social capital

"On Monday, the city's 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers' unions across the country. If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file. Newark's deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state's tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform. If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations - similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers' strike last month."

"The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: "How do we teach it?" In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it's time to crack that shell. It's time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group."

There is a dearth of research that supports paying teachers beyond their base salaries to improve student achievement, but there is a broad body of research that indicates that pay for performance might actually do damage as teachers feel a threat to their livelihoods because of this narrow method of measuring their efficacy. Pay for performance has been documented as compromising the good will and cooperation among teachers since it creates competition for a small amount of money, which can result in an "I'm out for myself only" attitude. Such a tone can hurt the necessary collaboration and communication found to nurture student achievement and success.

When the Michigan legislature returns from recess next week, and votes funds for higher education (far more meager than they used to be, but never mind), it will vote on Section 273a, passed by the House Appropriations Subcommittee, which, according to the Lansing State Journal, reads: It is the intent of the legislature that a public university that receives funds in section 236 shall not collaborate in any manner with a nonprofit worker center whose documented activities include coercion through protest, demonstration, or organization against a Michigan business.