Our Year in Rewiring School Systems for Better Student Learning
At CPRL, 2024 was another year of helping leaders across the education sector rethink not just what they are doing, but how they are doing it to better serve each and every student.
Over the course of the year, we worked with dozens of ed sector partners from across the U.S. to grapple with some of the biggest challenges in public education. At the same time we grew the pool of leaders able to do this work in the public sector by 65 aspiring leaders from an interdisciplinary group of 18 professional schools in law, policy, education, business, and data science, as part of our intensive semester-long equity-focused experience. In each of our projects, it was clear that finding solutions to the complex challenges in education require application of these varied perspectives and skills.
We are grateful for all of our partnerships, and as we look toward 2025, we are hopeful that a participatory approach to solving problems can help us get better at serving the needs of every child who walks through the school doors. Here’s some of where we see some real promise in the year ahead.
Effectively implementing high-quality curriculum and aligned professional learning. While there is tremendous focus on getting better math, reading and writing, and science curricula into the hands of teachers, as our friend and partner Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green aptly says, the hardest part of this work is implementation. Using new curriculum in the classroom is complex and personal for educators. To do it well, leaders of curriculum implementation need to systematically learn from teachers and school-level leaders how they are using their curricular materials, what they think of them, and why. Last year saw dozens of schools and systems take that approach by using the Curriculum Implementation Change Framework (CICF) we designed in partnership with curriculum developers, professional learning providers, change management and family engagement experts, and school system leaders. Curriculum developers and professional learning providers have embedded the tools in their materials and interest is growing.
Strengthening the educator workforce. As school systems across the U.S. struggle with educator shortages, CPRL has been partnering with the Connecticut Innovation Cohort, a diverse group of educator preparation programs, local school systems, policymakers, and advocates. The Cohort is working at all levels of the education system to professionalize teaching and to recruit, support, and sustain the educator workforce needed to prepare CT students for thriving lives of choice in our rapidly changing world. The efforts of the Cohort led to the most comprehensive and coordinated legislative change to educator certification and preparation in CT in decades, passed in May 2024. These efforts provide a model for other states, non-profit leaders, and philanthropic organizations seeking to leverage broadly participatory processes to design and support education systems. At the request of leaders in New York, we are now embarking on similar work there.
Meanwhile, nine district and charter system leaders are working with us as part of the Cohort to test and refine solutions to persistent staffing challenges in ways that modernize CT’s educator workforce and support every student's learning and growth. This fall, CPRL graduate students in education, policy, and law interviewed nearly 200 educators and administrators to surface each system’s unique strengths and challenges. System leaders will use that information to bolster their own educator pipelines and working environments and support further enhancements to the state's educator preparation and certification frameworks that professionalize teaching.
And finally our research on contracts and collective bargaining processes – written with support from our law and policy students and our friends at Educations for Excellence – sets a vision for how school systems can create more student-centered, flexible, transparent, and inclusive tools for strengthening student learning experiences and the teacher profession.
Bolstering school-family partnerships. With input from dozens of New York City-based school system, school, and support organization leaders, CPRL developed “The Tech-Powered Instructional Core: A Vision, a Test, and What it will take to Activate it Across New York City,” a playbook for schools and systems to create an instructional core that simultaneously leverages technology and human connections to allow for ongoing and personalized learning and improvement at every level, an enhanced sense of belonging for students in academic spaces, and strengthened educator-family-community relationships. Using a similarly inclusive process, CPRL also developed a toolkit in partnership with NYC Public Schools to support school leaders in engaging families in the implementation of NYC Reads. CPRL students designed and facilitated learning experiences for schools, districts, and families who planned to use the toolkit and supported ground-level implementation with individual schools. To date, seven districts, all NYCPS Family Leadership Coordinators, and about 30 NYC Reads Family Ambassadors have been trained on how to customize the toolkit’s strategy and resources for their contexts.
And our work to support systems in incorporating a range of voices into their design and implementation of policy and practice extends further – we sought out middle and high school students’ visions for the future of school, and we are supporting the design of a vision for literacy instruction in New York City, to name a couple of the projects we will share in detail in 2025.
If you’re inspired by the work we are doing with our partners across the ed sector, if you see the power in rewiring systems through democratic participation so that every single young person has access to the learning opportunities they need to thrive, join us and support CPRL this holiday season.
Happy Holidays!
Liz and the CPRL team