Our next Washington Education Innovation Forum will feature Jen Davis Wickens, Chief Regional Officer for Summit Public Schools, and Sarah Satinover, Summit’s Director of Growth.
Robin Lake

Twitter: @RbnLake
Amazon Author Page: Robin Lake, Author
Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K–12 public education. Her research focuses on U.S. public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools; innovation and scale; portfolio management; and effective state and local public oversight practices.
Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district-charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She is the editor of Unique Schools Serving Unique Students: Charter Schools and Children with Special Needs and editor of Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools. She co-authored, with Paul Hill, Charter Schools and Accountability in Public Education. She has provided invited testimonies to the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee as well as various state legislatures.
She presents regularly at conferences and summits around the United States, and has advised on charter school implementation in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Lake serves as a board member or advisor to various organizations, including the Journal of School Choice, the National Center on Special Education in Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and Education Next. She was named to the summer 2016 class of the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellows Program, designed to support exceptional leaders reimagining U.S. public schools.
Lake holds a BA in International Studies and an MPA in Education and Urban Policy from the University of Washington. She currently serves as Affiliate Faculty, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, at the University of Washington Bothell.
This paper provides an honest assessment of the portfolio strategy’s strengths, weaknesses, and necessary evolution.
State policy should encourage and empower school district innovation and improvement strategies.
Based on six years of research, this report explores why a growing number of districts and charter schools are choosing to work together, the costs and benefits of different types of cooperation, and the real impacts of successful collaboration on students and...
Robin Lake discusses opportunities that states have to support district-charter cooperation in the National Association of State Boards of Education's journal, The State Education Standard.
This analysis of trends across portfolio districts shows where cities are making progress on strategy implementation and where they are getting bogged down.
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The Forum featured former MN State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge, author of the nation's first charter school law, and Shannon Blankenship, tfounder of Hiawatha Academies, a high-performing Minneapolis charter school.
Robin Lake joins several leading education reformers and thinkers for a lively discussion of the accountability opt-out.
This Forum will feature leaders of New York City’s key innovation initiatives. Steven Hodas, Executive Director of Innovate NYC Schools, and Andrea Coleman, Director of iZone, will discuss the role school districts can play in promoting innovation and creating schools of the future.
Several CRPE researchers are presenting at the 2013 annual conference of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco.
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Robin Lake is interviewed in this Education Next podcast on school finance.
Robin Lake is quoted in this Houston Chronicle article on Superintendent Richard Carranza's plan to turnaround 32 schools across Houston.
CRPE director Robin Lake is quoted on how the portfolio strategy works in this Education Week piece on 21st century school districts.
CRPE's district-charter collaboration convening is summarized in this Education Week piece.
In this Seventy-Four commentary, CRPE director Robin Lake writes about the implications for special education in light of the Supreme Court ruling in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District.
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Robin Lake urges cities to leverage community assets, technology, and networks to improve services and supports for students with special needs.
Regulations of online schools are ripe for experimentation at the state and local levels, writes Robin Lake.
Superintendent Pedro Martinez and his team exemplify the problem-solving mentality of the portfolio strategy, writes Robin Lake.
Robin Lake writes that our public education system must do more to instill the values of civic engagement.
Twenty-five years ago, CRPE was founded on the idea of the school as the locus of change. Today we are reexamining our old assumptions in light of new technical possibilities, changes in the economy, and a recognition that even the most effective schools may need to develop new approaches to
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