The Public School Collaborative

About the Public School Collaborative

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

The Center’s faculty initiated the effort in 2013 by convening representatives of the state associations of School Boards, School Administrators, Principals and Supervisors, and the two teachers unions (the New Jersey Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers-NJ). In the past decade more than 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 initiatives for the improvement of teaching and learning. Among the most recent cohort is the state’s largest district, Newark Public Schools, where we have organized 3 days of workshops for all 64 schools in 2024-26. 

Since 2013 the Public School Collaborative has:

• Published a series of peer-reviewed research studies (detailed below) showing the positive effects of collaborative change on student achievement, teacher turnover, and other important outcomes. 
• Provided 4-5 day Capacity Building Workshops for 32 districts.
• Built a team of 30 peer facilitators – including active teachers, union leaders, principals and other administrators, superintendents, and school board members – to help their own schools and others implement the structures and processes of collaboration.
• Convened sixteen Inter-District 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 that 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. This book won an American Library Association Choice Award as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2024.
• 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.” 

Current Activities and Events

Completed in 2025

Capacity-building workshops

In 2025, the Public School Collaborative delivered 178 days of Capacity Building Professional Development across 96 schools in 11 NJ Public School Districts. This capacity building was conducted by Rutgers faculty and 15 Rutgers “Peer Facilitators” who are full time superintendents, principals, school board members, union leaders and teachers who do this work as Rutgers Instructors, and who delivered 197 days of facilitation.

This training included the largest district in the state: Newark, NJ, where we held three-day workshops for 64 schools; we will continue that work in 2026. 

From the Newark Leadership:

• Board of Education President Hasani K. Council: “In just one year, the School Leadership Councils have created new opportunities for collaboration, problem-solving, and shared leadership. This is exactly the type of partnership that will sustain Newark’s progress for years to come.” 
• Superintendent Roger Leon: “By bringing together teachers, parents, students, and community members, we are strengthening each school’s foundation and ensuring that collaboration is at the heart of school improvement.” 
• Newark Teachers’ Union President John Abeigon: “We are proud to have worked with the district to make this vision a reality.” 

Inter-district Learning Network Meeting

We held an Inter-District Conference on April 4, 2025 to share strategies, structures, and processes for deepening Collaborative Partnerships within districts and schools, and approaches for scaling this work across states and countries. Attendees included 150 people from New Jersey Public School Districts, along with a delegation of 10 South African educational leaders, including the nation’s Director-General of the Department of Basic Education, the General Secretary of the Education Labour Relations Council, and the General Secretary of SADTU, the largest  teachers’ union. 

Peer Facilitator Training

We conducted 4 days of training for Peer Facilitators, including 15 experienced facilitators and 15 new facilitators from NJ school districts. They were joined virtually for two days by 35 facilitators from the South African Labour Relations Council (ELRC). 

Publication

We published a book with Harvard Education Press on our work and publicly engaged scholarship: Democracy and Reform in Public Schools: The Case for Collaborative Partnerships (Saul Rubinstein, Charles Heckscher, John McCarthy). This book has been well reviewed and won an American Library Association Choice Award as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2024.

Plans for 2026

Capacity Building Workshops

By June we plan to continue our Capacity Building training with the Newark Public School District and to add an additional 6-8 new districts to the Collaborative. We are also scheduling ongoing training for current districts; a 5 district session took place in January 2026. The peer facilitators also offer continued support for problem-solving and conflict resolution after the initial training.

Rutgers Facilitator Training

We will conduct 2-4 days of facilitator training for both NJ and South African districts. 

Inter-District Learning Network

We plan to hold two state-wide Inter-district Conferences – one in on April 24, 2026 for current districts focusing on AI and Challenging Elementary School Behaviors, and another later in the year focused on the future of public education in New Jersey (co-sponsored with the Rutgers Bloustein School for Public Policy and the Rutgers Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies).

South Africa Technical Assistance

We will continue to host delegations from South Africa (Education Labour Relations Council, Department of Basic Education, South African Democratic Teachers Union and others). 

Research

We have partnered with the Rutgers Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, Directed by Distinguished Professor Charles Payne, to conduct a new round of research specifically focused on the impact of Collaborative Partnerships on urban schools. We are particularly interested in student achievement, graduation and drop-out rates, attendance, discipline, teacher turnover and retention, school culture and climate. Joining us in this research are colleagues from the Rutgers Department of Urban Education, Rutgers Bloustein School of Public Policy, Rutgers Department of Sociology, and Kean University. We have recruited graduate students to assist in this research.

Our research team is also partnering with several South African universities to conduct joint comparative research on the implementation and impact of Collaborative Partnerships on both sides of the Atlantic. This will be funded in part by our grant from Rutgers Global.

The Research 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.