Ted Kolderie

Thinking Out the How

Civic architect • System designer • Public education innovator
Known for: Helping develop the nation’s first charter school law and framing chartering as a strategy for system change
From: Omaha, Nebraska / St. Paul, Minnesota
Major work: The Split-Screen Strategy: How To Turn Public Education into a Self-Improving System (2015)

Ted Kolderie has spent a lifetime asking a question that many reformers never quite get around to asking: not only what should change, but how change can actually happen. That question became the signature of his career. It also became the title of one of his recent books, Thinking Out the How, which distills decades of work on public systems, democratic institutions, and school reform. Across a long career in public life, Kolderie argued that durable progress does not come from slogans, blame, or good intentions alone. It comes from redesigning institutions so that better outcomes become possible.

That way of thinking helps explain why Ted Kolderie occupies such a distinctive place in the charter school movement. He did not come to chartering having been primarily in public education. He came to it as a civic thinker. After graduating from Carleton College and Princeton’s School of Public Affairs, he worked as a reporter and editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, then served as executive director of the Citizens League and later as a senior fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Long before he became known nationally in education, he had built a reputation in Minnesota as a thinker about metropolitan governance, public finance, transportation, and the design of public institutions.

Chartering as a Strategy for System Change

That background mattered. Kolderie brought to education a habit of mind that was both rare and consequential: he looked past inherited arrangements and asked whether the system itself was organized to solve the problem in front of it. By 1982, however, when he became a member of Governor Quie’s education task force, his work had turned toward the redesign of K–12 public education. He became convinced that one of the central problems was the failure of traditional “school reform.” For years, policymakers had tried to improve public education through political action. Kolderie saw a different strategy, of improving public education by encouraging new ideas to be introduced from within.

That insight led him to describe chartering as “the research and development sector of public education.” In Kolderie’s view chartering was a strategy that by giving teachers, parents, and civic leaders the opportunity to create new public schools would test different approaches to learning and teaching. Chartering was about innovation. As the larger public system then learned from what worked, public education would become a gradually self-improving system.

That idea helped change American education. Ted Kolderie was instrumental in the development of Minnesota’s 1991 charter school law, the first in the nation. Along with other early pioneers in Minnesota, he helped make possible what became a nationwide movement. But his contribution was never only legislative. He gave the movement one of its deepest governing ideas: that chartering should be understood not merely as a collection of schools, but as a way for public education to open itself to innovation and improve by learning from it.

The national significance of his work was formally recognized in 2011, when the Education Commission of the States gave Kolderie its James Bryant Conant Award for outstanding contributions to American education. In announcing the award, ECS noted that his 1990 paper, “The States Will Have To Withdraw the Exclusive,” was widely regarded as a founding document of the charter movement. It also pointed to his work with legislators and citizens on the design and improvement of charter legislation in more than 25 states. ECS President Roger Sampson captured Kolderie’s role this way: “Ted Kolderie was and is a critical player in the charter school reform movement. For over thirty years he has shared his knowledge and innovative ideas with legislators and education leaders around the country to help them think about chartering as a strategy for system change.”

A Key Innovation Aims at Professionalizing Teaching

But Ted Kolderie’s legacy reached well beyond the law itself. He was always interested in what new schools could make possible for the people inside them, especially teachers. He believed that innovation in public education required not only different schools, but different professional arrangements. One of the ideas that mattered most to him was what he described as the key innovation in the charter sector: “applying to a public school the partnership form of organization found in most institutions we consider professional.”

That conviction helps explain the importance of the EdVisions and Teacher Cooperative strand of his work. Kolderie understood that if chartering was really to serve as a source of public innovation, it had to do more than create new schools. It had to create new forms of professional life inside schools. It had to show that teachers could exercise real judgment, assume collective responsibility, and build institutions around their expertise rather than simply function inside inherited hierarchies.

Richard Ingersoll, the University of Pennsylvania scholar whose research has focused on teaching as a profession and who wrote Who Controls Teachers’ Work?, captured the significance of that effort: “Teacher Powered Schools are really the most enhanced, advanced example of teacher professionalization that I’ve ever come across, anywhere in the world in fact. They are remarkable. And this has been accomplished in no small part due to Ted’s efforts.”

Kolderie’s influence on fellow leaders has been just as striking as his influence on policy. Howard Fuller, himself one of the most consequential figures in the charter school movement, has described Ted as both mentor and teacher. Fuller has said that every time he turned to Kolderie for guidance, he came away knowing more and thinking differently. What impressed Fuller most was Ted’s ability to conceptualize “what government can actually do, and how we can really change schooling,” along with his insistence that “we couldn’t get where we need to be by simply changing the schools that we have. It was necessary for us to create different kinds of schools.”

That tribute gets at something essential. One measure of Ted Kolderie’s contribution is that he changed laws. Another is that he changed minds. He helped people see that public education did not have to be trapped inside a single inherited arrangement. He gave reformers a language for thinking about public purpose and institutional pluralism at the same time. He showed that government’s role was not merely to operate one uniform system, but also to authorize, protect, and learn from innovation.

Traditional Approaches Often Do, in Time, Become Obsolete

One of the striking things about Ted Kolderie is that his influence has been both conceptual and practical. Many people can generate ideas. Fewer can help those ideas enter law. Fewer still can shape the thinking of a movement over decades. Kolderie did all three. He helped give chartering its rationale; not novelty for its own sake but a system capable of learning, improving, and responding more effectively. He helped lawmakers and civic leaders understand that even successful ways of doing things can, in time, become obsolete. He urged people to read Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations.

That larger argument is visible across Kolderie’s writing. His most influential book is probably The Split-Screen Strategy: How To Turn Public Education into a Self-Improving System (2015). In recent years, he has often chosen to publish shorter booklets focused on public education and institutional redesign.

Ted Kolderie’s induction into the National Charter School Hall of Fame honors much more than a policy accomplishment. It honors a particular kind of leadership: patient, idea-driven, structurally minded, and not limited to public education. He taught those interested in change that if a system is not producing the results it promises, the answer is not always to spend more or to remove those currently in charge. The answer might be to redesign the system.

That is Ted Kolderie’s legacy. He helped America see chartering not simply as permission to start new schools, but as the research and development sector of public education and as part of a larger effort to make public education a self-improving system. He reminded the movement that institutions matter, that innovation must be protected if it is to emerge, and that the most powerful reforms are often the ones that gradually change what a public system is able to become. For that gift of mind, and for the public courage to act on it, Ted Kolderie is one of the indispensable architects of charter schooling in America.