Our Values and Approach

Vision

Expand access to high-quality education for all students — particularly those of color and from low-income households.

Mission

Revitalize public education while reinventing professional education.

Our Theory of Action

If CPRL…

Prepares a diverse pool of students from multiple professional schools with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to enact organizational learning and change
Provides affordable, high-quality research and consulting services to organizations committed to improving public education, particularly for children of color, from low-income households, or otherwise traditionally underserved
Empowers a broad network of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educators and their stakeholders with ideas, tools, and practices designed to accelerate improvement and spread experiential learning;

Then CPRL will...

Strengthen the capacity of a wide array of professionals to improve public education
Intensify higher education’s role in improving public education and other public institutions
Increase the ability of education organizations and their leaders to learn, evolve, and improve themselves

As a result, CPRL will…

Expand access to high-quality education for all students—particularly those of color, from low-income households, or otherwise traditionally underserved

"Inequity has been a feature of American schools for too long. We seek to disrupt inequity by pursuing a broad-based, iterative approach to helping advance educational equity."

-Kimberly Austin, Deputy Director of Quality and Improvement

Our Core Values

Promote Equity: We advance systems and practices that eliminate historical and systemic barriers to opportunity and that work to ensure students’ identities and background characteristics, particularly race and socioeconomic status, do not predict their success in school and beyond. The imperative to achieve educational equity—and our deep belief in our nation’s and world’s capacity to do so—drive all of our other values.
Learn and Improve: We approach all contexts, opportunities, and interactions with a learning stance. As individuals and as an organization, we position ourselves to get better all the time. We identify and are transparent about strengths and challenges, we research and experiment to understand what works, we share knowledge, and we evolve our theories of action. We do the same with our stakeholders, especially our graduate students and clients, in an effort to help public education better serve all children, particularly those of color, from low-income households, or otherwise traditionally underserved.
Be Passionately Optimistic: We know all problems are solvable. We are dedicated to addressing barriers to high-quality education, particularly those that impede access for students of color, from low-income households, or otherwise traditionally underserved, regardless of how entrenched and intractable those barriers may appear to be.
Cocreate and Reorient: We believe that deep learning and improvement requires stakeholders to engage collaboratively in problem solving. We believe diverse perspectives, disciplines, and strengths must come together to create lasting change, and, therefore, we reject traditional and artificial divides that silo groups of people, ideas, and skills. This purposeful disruption allows us to reorient the system not only through our outcomes but also through our method of making progress.
Deliver Rigor and Excellence: We produce work that is intellectually rigorous, thoughtful, and impactful, both in its design and execution. We look for and generate creative, novel, and ambitious ideas that will drive improvement in education. We believe that our responsibility to our children, particularly those of color, from low-income households, and otherwise traditionally underserved, requires that we hold ourselves to high standards of quality in every aspect of our work.
Pursue Sustainability: We pursue the long-term health and productivity of our organization and its stakeholders. We view short-term and intermediate results as important opportunities for reflection and learning. We believe that diverse perspectives and experiences are needed to develop ever more effective and efficient actions and improved outcomes.

Vision

Mission

Our Theory of Action

Theory of Action (Full Text Version)

Our Core Values

Promote Equity

Learn and Improve

Be Passionately Optimistic

Cocreate and Reorient

Deliver Rigor and Excellence

Pursue Sustainability

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