The Public School Collaborative

About the Public School Collaborative

The Public School Collaborative brings together stakeholders in the public education system to work on systems and initiatives for the improvement of teaching and learning. This work is based on extensive research showing positive effects of collaboration on student performance, teacher turnover, and other important outcomes. 

In the past decade thirty New Jersey districts have been trained in the skills of collaboration, have started school- and district-level leadership teams, and have embarked on new reform initiatives. These initiatives seek not just the smoothing out of stakeholder conflicts, but also major improvements in student performance and development.

Among the most recent cohort is the state’s largest district, Newark Public Schools. 

Since 2010 the Public School Collaborative has:

• Published a series of peer-reviewed research studies showing the positive effects of collaborative change on student achievement, teacher turnover, and other important outcomes. 
• Brought together the major institutional stakeholders – the state associations of Superintendents, School Boards, Principals and supervisors, and the major unions.
• Provided 4–5 day Capacity Building Workshops for the 30 districts.
• Built a team of peer facilitators – including active teachers, union leaders, principals and other administrators, superintendents, and school board members – to help their own schools and others in the process of collaboration.
• Brought together the districts fourteen times for conferences to share learnings and review progress, thus building a larger network of relationships and support extending throughout the state.
• Worked with the  South African teachers and principals unions, the Department of Basic Education, and the Education Labour Relations Council to extend the model throughout the country’s nine provinces. 
• Hosted a national gathering of collaborative reform efforts to develop a model for scaling beyond single schools, districts, or states – in order to impact national educational systems. 

In 2024, published a book with the Harvard Education Press on the research and practice behind this work.

Background

For four decades the national debate over public school reform has created friction among teachers unions, administrators, school boards, parents, policymakers, and other stakeholders in public education and has fueled disagreements over how to improve the quality of teaching and learning for children. Division among the key stakeholders has been a key obstacle to progress.

Research by the Center’s faculty published in 2011 examined cases of school reform across the country and identified elements that all school districts with long-term union-management partnerships shared in common. Further research in 25 districts across 6 states demonstrated that formal union-management committees and collaborative partnerships improve student achievement even in high poverty schools. These partnerships lead to more extensive collaboration among teachers as well as between teachers and administrators. Specifically they found the following benefits from collaborative partnerships:

• Improved student performance. The quality of formal partnerships between teachers unions, administrators, and teachers at the school level is a significant predictor of student performance, as well as performance improvement, after poverty and school type are taken into account. This improvement is associated with increases in various dimensions of communication.  

• More extensive communication among teachers about ways to improve teaching and learning. Higher-quality, school-level teacher-administrator partnerships predicted more extensive school-level collaboration and communication around: student-performance data; curriculum development, cross-subject integration, or grade-to-grade integration; sharing, advising, or learning about instructional practices; and giving or receiving formal or informal mentoring.

• More frequent and positive communication between union representatives and principals. Finally, the quality of partnerships predicted different communication patterns between union building representatives and principals, with the communication in high-partnership schools becoming more frequent and less formal than the communication in low-partnership schools.

• Enhanced learning among schools and the adoption of innovation from one school to another. Achievement tests can reveal deficiencies in student knowledge, but they can offer little more beyond alerting parents and teachers to a problem. Collaborative partnerships, because they are problem focused, can take the critical next steps and help drive thinking about ways to increase student learning. These types of partnerships are designed to use collaboration among educators to find solutions to gaps in student achievement and then effectively implement those solutions because those closest to the problem – with tacit knowledge of it – are key stakeholders in the improvement process.

Another benefit has become increasingly important in recent years:

• Dramatic reduction in teacher turnover and intention to leave the profession – especially in high-poverty schools, which are particularly plagued by high turnover. When teachers feel that their voice is heard and are involved in improving education in the classroom, they are much less likely to experience dissatisfaction and loss of commitment.

The Center's faculty initiated the NJ Public School Labor Management Collaborative in 2013. The first step was a meeting at Rutgers with leaders of the key state education associations to discuss the Center’s research showing the positive impact of collaboration on student achievement. The leaders of these associations – the New Jersey School Boards Association (NJSBA), the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the New Jersey Association of School Administrators (NJASA), and the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association (NJPSA), and the American Federation of Teachers(AFTNJ) – then committed to a collaborative effort and recruited school districts to create labor-management district partnerships.

As the initiative spread beyond New Jersey and encompassed an increasing array of stakeholders, the name was changed in 2024 to the “Public School Collaborative.”

Selected Publications

• Democracy and Reform in Public Schools: The Case for Collaborative Partnerships. Harvard Education School Press. 2024.

• Union-Management Partnerships, Teacher Collaboration, and Student Performance. Industrial and Labor Relations Review. 2016.

• Teachers Unions and Management Partnerships - How Working Together Improves Student Achievement. Center for American Progress. 2014.

• Public School Reform Through Union-Management Collaboration. Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations. 2012.

• Reforming Public School Systems through Sustained Union-Management Collaboration. Center for American Progress. 2011.