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A Chronology of CCE

The early years of CCE
The Center for Collaborative Education - Metro Boston, Inc., was founded by Larry Myatt and Linda Nathan in September 1994, when both were Co-Directors of the Fenway Middle College High School, Boston’s first Pilot School. The purpose of the Center was “to provide technical assistance to schools in and around Boston that are interested in restructuring and implementing creative new educational models to improve student learning.” The Center was intended to become a regional center for the National Coalition of Essential Schools, serving CES schools in the Greater Boston area. The concept and the Center’s name were patterned after the Center for Collaborative Education in New York City, founded by Deborah Meier to support CES schools there.

In partnership with Fenway Middle College High School, the Center was housed rent-free in Bunker Hill Community College, next to Fenway High School. Seed funding for the Center was provided in large part through a grant from the Goldberg Family Foundation and from the Coalition of Essential Schools’ Centers of Activity project through a grant from the DeWitt Wallace Foundation. Its initial Guiding Principles were the following:

· Provide direct hands-on technical assistance
· Function as a learning organization
· Focus on approaches that work
· Emphasize documentation

The initial two years found the Center engaged in a number of activities involving local school communities in improving practice and sharing knowledge:

· Visits to Fenway Middle College High School - to provide practitioners with an indepth look at how a small, urban, personalized school works
· Formation of the Boston Educators for School Reform (BESR) network, the precursor to the Boston Pilot Schools Network; it comprised the leaders of the Pilot Schools so they could engage in sharing practice and addressing common concerns with the district.
· The Innovative Schools Project - to work with three high schools on school restructuring: Brighton High School and Charlestown High School in Boston, and Winthrop High School. The Center’s work at Brighton High School led in large part to its adoption of smaller learning communities, and Winthrop High School ended up adopting the Coalition of Essential Schools’ reform model.
· The Portfolio Network - to work with teachers in encouraging the use of portfolios as teaching tools. The network conducted several sharing sessions for teachers in the Greater Boston area who were interested in developing their portfolio practice.
· Foxfire - to work with teachers from two schools to adopt Foxfire practices of literacy. (Foxfire is a model of engaging students in strengthening literacy through gathering and re-telling stories from the community in which they reside.)
· Conferences - CCE conducted the conference, Reinventing Public Education: The Move Toward Small Schools, which 130 participants attended in teams, and held a breakfast on the Pilot Schools, which 75 people attended.
· CCE was a key player in bringing Annenberg funds to the Boston Public Schools.

In the spring of 1997 the Board (of which Linda Nathan and Larry Myatt, CCE’s co-founders, were members) hired Dan French, the current executive director. In April 1997 the Center hosted a two-day leadership retreat for the Boston Pilot Schools. At the time, the Pilot Schools were still operating individually, and negotiating separately with the district. At this retreat, the Pilot Schools agreed to the following:

· To unite and form the Boston Pilot Schools Network, in order to have one voice with the district;
· To develop and endorse a set of guiding principles which would govern the Network;
· To have the Center for Collaborative Education serve as the Network’s coordinating organization.

This represented the Center’s first official school network.

Recent history of CCE
The next five years were marked by continued growth of the Center, to its current status as a center for reform networks and as an active voice in the community:

In the spring of 1997, the Center began managing the funds of a few Pilot Schools. This figure has grown to about $1 million annually in managed school funds.

In June of 1997, the Carnegie Corporation agreed to provide two-year funding to the Center to launch the Boston Turning Points Network, a middle school reform model. In the fall of 1998, the Carnegie Corporation, based on our initial field work in Boston, asked the Center to become the National Turning Points Center and to affiliate with New American Schools, an umbrella organization serving national school reform models. The Carnegie Corporation began the process of granting CCE the trademark name, Turning Points. The Center began building a national TP staff and evolving the model further, including the development of the Turning Points Guides and newsletter, and recruiting regional centers across the country.

In the fall of 1997, the Center officially became the Massachusetts Coalition of Essential Schools Regional Center. In 2001, the Center began working in schools in Connecticut and was renamed the Southern New England Coalition of Essential Schools Regional Center.

In the fall of 1997, the Center launched the planning phase of the SIMSE (Systemic Initiative in Math and Science Education) project, funded in large part by the Noyce Foundation, to assist CES schools in math and science, with implementation beginning in the summer of 1998. After a successful first three years of implementation, the Noyce Foundation provided a second three-year grant to the Center in the summer of 2001 to embed SIMSE’s systemic math-science model in all of the Center’s reform networks.

In the fall of 1998, the Center moved to its current home at Renaissance Park.

In the fall of 1999, the Center underwent the CES affirmation process as a CES regional center. While the resulting report was very complimentary, a significant finding was that the Center had disparate programs (CES, TP, Pilots) with no overarching theory of action. This finding led to the further development of CCE’s mission and to the creation of the CCE Theory of Action that provides an overarching philosophy and approach to school reform across all the Center’s programs. In addition, each network team began the process of creating benchmarks and road maps for the work in schools.

In the fall of 1999, the Center hired its first western Massachusetts staff person, as a result of a growing demand for our work in that section of the state.

In December of 1999, the Center began increasing its internal capacity, hiring a Comptroller to replace our Business Manager, as our revenue and staffing had increased substantially. This was followed in February 2001 with the hiring of a Technology and Communications Director to manage our computer network, launch a CCE website, and improve our public relations materials.

In the spring of 2000, the Center launched the Principals Residency Network, an apprenticeship-based principal preparation and credentialing program. The first cohort of 10 aspiring principals began graduating in the fall of 2001. By the fall of 2003, PRN was working with its fourth cohort of aspiring principals.

In the spring of 2000, the Center started a Research and Evaluation unit to begin documenting our work. Beginning in 2001, the Center began presenting research studies at various conferences, and using the findings of the studies to improve our work. In the fall of 2001, the Center published its first two evaluation reports, both on the Pilot Schools, which garnered widespread interest.

In the summer of 2000, the Center received a significant grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to launch the New England Small Schools Network to work with urban New England districts to create Pilot-like schools (with charter-like autonomy) through free-standing new schools or through converting large schools to small ones sharing facilities. Five districts (Worcester, Lawrence, Malden, Cambridge, Providence) were selected in the spring of 2001, and the network was launched in the summer of 2001 with the goal of creating 35 small schools. By the fall of 2003, Utica and Leominster had joined the network, while Cambridge was no longer a NESSN district.

In the fall of 2001, the Center launched its community organizing model in its theory of action through hiring our first full-time Community Coordinator to build community and political support for the Pilot Schools and New England Small Schools Network.