District-Charter Collaboration Grant Implementation: Final Findings from Interviews and Site Visits
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District-Charter Collaboration Grant Implementation: Final Findings from Interviews and Site Visits

Interim Report
Published: May 12, 2016
Publisher: Washington, DC: Mathematica Policy Research
Human Services Education School Choice and Charters Research and Evaluation Evaluation Design Policy Analysis
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Full Publication
Associated Project

Evaluation of the District-Charter Collaboration Grants

Time frame: 2013-2016

Prepared for:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Authors

Moira McCullough

Betsy Keating

Luke Heinkel

Key Findings

Key Findings:

  • Cross-sector collaboration remains less widespread among school leaders than central office administrators, but is particularly strong among participants in grant-funded intensive leadership training or principal residency programs. Teacher-level collaboration remains low across the grantee sites, in part because many of the collaborative activities targeted school leaders rather than teachers.
  • Compact collaboration activities have not yielded systemic change within the grant period but were perceived to have resulted in small-scale improvements in instructional quality and human capital practices and increased availability of information about the relative effectiveness of individual schools across all sectors.
  • Collaboration appears to have slowly spread outside the formal grant activities in three grantee sites via the “observational effect of collaboration” but has not extended beyond the grant in other sites. Perceptions of the sustainability of collaboration efforts beyond the end of the grant period were mixed across grantee sites.
  • Cross-sector leadership programs were widely viewed as the most successful collaboration grant activities. At the same time, the grant time period and scope were perceived as too limited to yield widespread impacts; lack of clarity around goals also hindered implementation. A handful of respondents across many sites doubted that cooperation alone is a viable mechanism for improving school effectiveness.

Mathematica has been studying the implementation of Gates-funded district-charter collaboration grants since July 2013. In a new report, we examine trajectories and intermediate impacts of grant implementation through the end of the grant period (December 2015), focusing on the direct participants in the collaborations. The main goal of the analysis was to improve understanding of how collaboration and practice sharing can occur across sectors. Collecting and analyzing data from semi-structured interviews with central-office administrators and school principals and teacher focus groups conducted in late 2015, Mathematica examined four research questions:

 

  1. To what extent do schools and staff collaborate across sectors? How have grant activities influenced collaboration among participating staff during the three-year grant period?
  2. What contextual factors have played a role in the implementation of the collaboration grant and in cross-sector collaboration more broadly?
  3. How do respondents perceive the impacts of the collaboration grant, both for participants and more broadly? To what extent do respondents view collaboration efforts as sustainable?
  4. What have we learned from the grant implementation that could inform future collaboration efforts? What aspects of grant implementation were most successful? What are the primary limitations of the grant or problems of practice reported by grantees and what recommendations do respondents have for overcoming these challenges?

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