5-Year Process for Successful Charter Renewal

The Learning Collective works with charter schools, including those in need of turnaround, to successfully renew their charters. In fact, all charter schools with which we’ve worked have successfully achieved renewal. The Learning Collective occupies a unique niche – our clients include charter schools AND charter school authorizers. Our authorizer clients have included Central Michigan […]

Half-Day Strategic Planning Most Valuable

Through the California Department of Education’s Public Charter Schools Grant Program, The Learning Collective has conducted external reviews of 80 charter schools, 16 of which were remote reviews during the COVID-19 pandemic. Going beyond the requirements by the California Department of Education, we have added a half-day strategic planning session which has proven to be […]

Charter Visits: 3 Lessons Learned

Over the past 15+ years, we’ve conducted hundreds of charter school evaluation and renewal visits in over 10 states. We’ve learned a lot through this work. These are just three of our lessons learned:

Strategic Planning with DCS

In 2018 and 2019, The Learning Collective partnered with Discovery Charter School (DCS) on a couple projects. We developed a three-year academic plan, beginning in the 2018-19 school year, and evaluated the extent to which that plan was implemented during the course of the plan’s first year. In the summer of 2019 we then worked with […]

2019 TLC Highlights

2019 was a productive years for The Learning Collective. We led strategic planning projects with some new clients, such as Discovery Charter School and the Beginning with Children education network in New York, and with authorizers such as those through our partnership with Oklahoma Public School Resource Center.

Helping Found Coalition of Public Independent Charter Schools

For the past few months, The Learning Collective has been actively participating on the National Coordinating Committee to create the Coalition of Public Independent Charter Schools (CPICS). CPICS is focused on shaping practices, informing policies and increasing collaboration of independent charter schools across the country!

Writing & Discourse Not Happening at Blended Schools

   The Learning Collective was recently in Detroit working with four of the city’s traditional public and charter schools.  Several of those schools rely heavily on digital learning programs. The Learning Collective has noticed that in these and other blended learning schools there are two areas that tend to get left behind: writing and discourse.

20 Takeaways from NACSA and iNACOL Conferences

 The Learning Collective recently attended two annual conferences: NACSA / National Association of Charter School Authorizers and iNACOL / International Association for K-12 Online Learning.  Keeping the list to just 10 proved too difficult so here are the top 20 takeaways from those conferences:

Insights from Conference Presentations

The Learning Collective has presented at a couple conferences this spring.  Specifically, we’ve presented about blended learning at the inaugural, national Online Education Symposium for Independent Schools (OESIS) and at the California Charter Schools Association’s (CCSA) 20th Annual Conference.