Center for Policy Design

Ted Kolderie

Distinguished Senior Fellow 

Walter McClure

Ted Kolderie has worked on system questions and with legislative policy in different areas of public life: urban and metropolitan affairs and public finance through the 1960s and '70s. He began working in the 1970s with questions about the redesign of the operating side of the public sector; with the Public Service Options project. He was involved nationally on these questions with the Rand Corporation, SRI International, the Urban Institute and others.


During the 1980s he ran the Public Services Redesign Project while at the University of Minnesota school of public affairs. By the mid-1980s the work had come to focus on the redesign of K-12 public education; system and schools. Since 2009 he has again been closely involved with the broader questions about the redesign of major public systems; governmental and non-governmental.


A graduate of Carleton College and of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University, Ted was previously a reporter and editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, executive director of the Citizens League and a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Publications

Chartering Is a Strategy for Minnesota Public Education

March 2024 - By Ted Kolderie

This small booklet explains the second sector of public education, created by the Minnesota Legislature in 1991, as essentially the state's strategy for change and improvement. Chartering offers districts, teachers, parents and others the opportunity to create new public schools that try and test different approaches to school and schooling. 


The booklet describes the program, and the important innovations that have in fact appeared in this new sector over its now 30-plus years of operation. One example is the application of the 'partnership' arrangement to the organization of a school; creating a professional work-life for teachers. 


It makes clear that 'charter schools' is far more than the individual schools themselves.


This booklet is available as a free pdf here.


Conventional School Is . . . Obsolete

December 2023 - By Ted Kolderie

Our discussion about 'the schools' tends to accept the current way of doing things as 'right' . . . when the question needing to be asked about the institution is whether it works.


Many institutions did great things in their time. Times change; new things appear, making obsolete what was there before.


Public education did great things in its time. Now a new technology of education is developing, making obsolete the traditional form of school and the approach to teaching and learning long accepted as 'right'.


This small booklet describes this innovation. It puts squarely to those in the district sector the question of adopting this 'fundamentally different' model of schooling. It suggests this can be done if the process begins with those now ready and is spread -- diffuses -- gradually.


Conventional School is . . . Obsolete. is available as a free pdf here.


Innovative Authorizing for Minnesota's Chartered Schools

August 2022 · By John Kostouros and Ted Kolderie

Our series of booklets on Minnesota's chartering program began with the Guide you see above. Within the program set up by that institutional innovation have come various other innovations.


One of these has to do with the process of authorizing schools. Initially, here and elsewhere, authorizers were existing organizations: universities, foundations, districts, large social-service organizations. Then in 2009 Minnesota's legislature created the 'single-purpose authorizer'. This opened the way for the creation of new nonprofits having no other function than to solicit, receive, review and act on proposals for new schools—and to oversee the schools it approved. 


This booklet by John Kostouros describes this innovation with particular attention to one of them, Innovative Quality Schools, and to its innovative way of organizing and financing the work of approval and school oversight; simultaneously broadening its competence and reducing its costs.


Innovative Authorizing for Minnesota's Chartered Schools is available as a free PDF here and use this link to send it to others.


Should Minnesota's Public Schools Be Obliged to Ensure that Students Learn?

June 2022 · By Ted Kolderie

To the question on the cover a good many Minnesotans might answer 'Yes' — and wonder: "Don't they have to do that now?"


The answer, probably, is that they're expected to get their students to learn . . . but not obliged to. A legal obligation would be created were the state constitution to be amended to establish a civil right to a 'quality education' as proposed in what is now termed "the Page amendment".

 

That 'case', perhaps the most fundamental challenge ever raised against Minnesota public education, is now before the Legislature. 


This 'amicus brief' lays out a way to ensure student learning not through the courts but by expanding an approach to teaching that is in fact already developing in Minnesota. 


Should Minnesota's Public Schools Be Obliged to Ensure that Students Learn ?
is available as a free PDF here and use this link to send it to others.

Thinking Out the How

April 2021 · By Ted Kolderie

This book of recollections, covering the author’s time in public affairs here, is mainly about Minnesota’s experience in changing and modernizing its public systems. 

 

Section Six tells the story of the transformation of public education in the state, from the conventional franchised public utility into today’s range of public options. This new edition brings the education story up to date through 2021.

 

Readers might find other chapters useful in explaining the civic structure that makes major change possible.


Thinking Out the How is available as a free PDF here. Print copies are available on Amazon .

Helping All Students To Realize Their Potential

January 2021 · By Ted Kolderie

This policy paper is intended to help shape a discussion
much needed in Minnesota. 


The proposal for a constitutional amendment to guarantee all students a ‘quality education’ has raised two questions: how to define ‘quality’ learning, and how to develop the quality schooling to ensure that quality education can be implemented. 


In laying out ‘the Frymier strategy’ as a way to answer those questions this paper will,
I hope, contribute usefully to the discussion


Click to view and download >>

Minnesota is Creating a Self-Improving System

July 2019 · By Ted Kolderie
This paper makes a surprising assertion . . . that Minnesota’s redesign of public education is close to creating a set of options for students broad enough that each truly can get the education s/he wants and needs.

This is good news. But a critical step remains. That is to help districts make their schools more attractive, and more successful in the open, diverse system of public education the Legislature has created.

Good friends will encourage districts to make that difficult adjustment. If you know others who see the problem, use this link to send this paper to them: http://bit.ly/MinnesotaSystemRedesign

It is the traditional form of organization that constrains districts’ capacity to adapt. A second paper shows how the Legislature can help them with their transition. See: http://bit.ly/FourOptionalPlans 

Organizing Districts to Enable Schools to Motivate Students

July 2019 · By Ted Kolderie
How the Legislature can help with district redesign: Here is a draft bill to establish an 'optional forms' process.

It can be viewed as a PDF (here).

How the State can Deal with the School Boards' Inertia

March 2018 · By Ted Kolderie
All of us working to think out the rationale and the design for a self-improving system understand the challenge: Traditional education policy has thought in terms of ‘ordering’ the system with decisions from above. We are convinced success lies in starting with schools and teachers.

It can be viewed as a PDF (here).

The Split Screen Strategy: How to Turn Education Into a Self-Improving System

September 2015 · By Ted Kolderie

This is a challenging but a hopeful book. Its author - involved for more than 30 years with education policy and politics at the local, state and national level – insists this country could be getting a lot more than it is from both its students and their teachers. But not with the current, conventional, 'theory of action'. It is a mistake to go on only pushing for performance; assuming public education can be better without school having to be different. It is necessary and it is possible to make 'school' different. No one is going to 'blow the system up and start over'. But this now-inert system can open to new approaches to learning and new forms of school. Innovation, gradually spreading and steadily improving, is systemic change. That is the way successful systems change.


This new 'theory of action' will turn education into a self-improving system. The Split-Screen Strategy explains how that can be done with a strategy that creates a 'climate of encouragement for innovation', opening the way for schools and teachers to try things. This different approach asks educators - and our policy leadership - to rethink the notion that change is 'something the boss does' . . . to consider how differently teachers would behave and how they would change school if they had truly professional roles . . . how much better students would learn if school were organized to maximize motivation . . . how much more effective the national government would be if presidents made their proposals not to Congress but to the legislatures in whose law the education system exists. Endlessly deploring the problems and endlessly reaffirming the need to 'do better' does not move anything ahead. We need to get education changing the way successful systems change. The book explains what boards of education can do, what state legislatures and governors can do. It sets out dramatically different roles for the national government - and a surprising role for teacher unions.


The Split-Screen Strategy is available as a free PDF and as an e-book on Amazon Kindle , and Barnes and Noble Nook. Hard copies are available on Amazon .


It can be viewed as a PDF ( here ).

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