Charter School “Coopetition”
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 By Matthew Carr
The LA Times reports on a new study of charter school performance in the city of angels. The study, conducted by the California Charter Schools Association, found that “charters in LAUSD outperform traditional public schools on a variety of student achievement measures.” But, the interesting part of this story is not the study’s findings, but rather the response from the LA school system.
Ramon C. Cortines, L.A. Unified’s newly appointed senior deputy superintendent, said the report pointed to how traditional schools could learn from charters — a strikingly different attitude from that typically expressed by district officials.
“I think that what it says is that they have some best practices, and those should be replicated in the district in all schools,” he said. “I would say the same about islands of excellence in the Unified district. . . . We need to each learn from each other.”He said the district Monday held the first in a series of meetings that will bring together principals from charters and traditional schools to discuss how they can learn from one another.
Perhaps the LAUSD administration is taking a page out of Cleveland Municipal’s playbook with their decision to seek cooperation. Just last month the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on a meeting of city school administrators and local charter operators.
…leaders of traditional public education and upstart charter schools treated one another with kid gloves on Wednesday, agreeing to work together to provide opportunities for all Cleveland children.
“We’re in this together,” said Eric Gordon, chief academic officer for the Cleveland public schools. “We either go down together, or we reinforce things that work.”
Gordon appeared with representatives of three of Cleveland’s top-performing charter schools: Citizens’ Academy, the Intergenerational School and the Entrepreneurship Preparatory Academy. The latter is sponsored by the Cleveland district.
The discussion seemed to signal a new era of cooperation between traditional public schools and charter schools, independent schools that are publicly funded but privately operated.
For many observers of the charter school program such meetings may seem anathema to the competitive spirit that is supposed to be infused in the battle for students and funding. However, there is good reason to believe that “coopetition”, or collaboration between firms that compete for customers, may be a valuable framework for conceptualizing the relationship between charters and district schools. We ask charters to both compete for students, and thus introduce quasi-market forces into the education system, and to be laboratories for innovations, with the successful approaches transferred to the traditional public schools. In short, we expect them to be both competitors and cooperators in the overall education system. If more school systems took the Cleveland and LA approach to their coopetition, they could just create a win-win situation for all involved.
Tags: Charter Schools, Competition, Education
