Overview
The District-Charter Collaborative (DCC) facilitates collaboration between district and charter schools with the goals of improving instructional practices and student outcomes while building schools’ capacity to solve their own problems of practice and eliminate disparities along the lines of race.
Through DCC, district and charter schools form learning communities of four schools (“quads”) and work together over two academic years to identify a problem of practice within a particular Learning Focus Area (LFA). The quads address their LFAs by engaging in a series of interschool visits, professional development, and regular school planning meetings that utilize an inquiry process to drive collective learning. 39 district and charter schools are participating in DCC in the 2019-2020 school year. LFAs include:
- Addressing the Needs of Individual Learners Through Specially Designed Instruction
- Addressing the Needs of Multilingual Learners
- Building a Student-Centered Community through Restorative Practices
- Building College and Career Readiness through Career and Technical Education
- Culturally Responsive Math Instruction
- Facilitating Family and Community Empowerment to Create Equitable Schools
- Promoting Literacy Across the Content Areas
- Incorporating STEAM programming
Goals
The District-Charter Collaborative seeks to:
- Improve educator practices and student outcomes: DCC schools share, adapt, and adopt strong practices and make measurable improvements toward meeting year-long goals, with a particular emphasis on improving outcomes for Black and Latino students.
- Strengthen school capacity to engage in continuous improvement: DCC schools develop requisite skills and tools to engage in disciplined inquiry as a vehicle for school improvement.
- Address inequities that manifest along the lines of race: DCC schools nurture leaders for equity who work to eliminate opportunity and system gaps and ensure success for all students.
- Leverage the unique strengths of district and charter schools to help each other improve on shared issues and contribute to the establishment of a system-wide culture of collaboration: DCC schools utilize collaborative structures within and across schools and sectors as a vehicle for school improvement and forge relationships sustained beyond participation in the program.
Structure
Participating schools assemble a school team that consists of the school principal and up to four additional staff members that are committed to fostering improvement in the school’s chosen LFA, including one member who will be identified as the DCC school team coordinator (STC). School teams and quads are supported by a dedicated facilitator from the DCC team who:
- Facilitates regular meetings with each school team, guiding them through an inquiry process to drive improvement within their LFA and building their capacity to do this work independently.
- Coordinates a series of structured school inter-visitations that highlight promising practices in the group’s focus area, allow each school to seek feedback relating to its own practices, and leverage the expertise of the quad to problem-solve challenges identified by each school in its inquiry work.
- Partners with providers that will deliver tailored professional development within each group’s LFA.