National Charter-District Collaboration Conference Set for November

A conference that will highlight the best examples of cooperative practices between charter and traditional public schools is set for November 4-5, 2012, in Broomfield, Colorado, just outside Denver.

The Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools is working with partners on the Best Cooperative Practices: Charter & Traditional Public Schools conference, which will come about two years after the first conference focused on the topic was held in Columbus, Ohio, in September 2010. That conference was the subject of a National Charter School Resource Center newsletter, and proceedings were published.

“To a large extent, from 2010 to 2012, we have moved from seminal work in the area of promising collaborations to more and more-mature examples of effective cooperative enterprises,” according to conference organizers.

In Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools in 2011, the Center on Reinventing Public Education reported that districts and charter schools are “working on some of the most difficult problems that choice creates in order to reap the deepest and most widespread promise that choice offers,” but that “moving away from antagonism and defiance and toward true collaboration and problem solving isn’t easy.”

Charter-district collaboration compacts have been created in at least 16 cities -- from Los Angeles to Central Falls, Rhode Island, and from Chicago to Spring Branch, Texas.

Collaboration between charter schools and districts has been supported by a program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is among the organizations providing support for the conference.