Zach Craddock is superintendent of Third Future Schools, a nonprofit charter school network and school turnaround partner.
In most sectors of American life, sustained failure triggers intervention. When a company misses its targets year after year, leadership changes, strategy shifts and accountability follows.
Public education often operates under a different standard: Schools can receive failing ratings for years while the national debate spins in circles around ideology.
One side argues for charter expansion. The other defends district systems. Conferences are held. Reports are written. Political lines harden.
Meanwhile, the students in struggling schools keep waiting.
Texas chose to move past that stalemate. In 2017, the state enacted the Texas Partnerships Act (SB 1882), incentivizing school districts to partner with experienced charter operators to turn around chronically underperforming campuses.
The schools remain public and governed by elected boards, but operational authority shifts to organizations with a clear mandate to improve results. The goal isn’t to relabel schools as “charter” or leave districts to continue with the status quo. It’s to move beyond that false choice.
The model reframes the debate around a simpler question: If a school has struggled for years, what structural and systemic changes will actually help students succeed?
For the families in those schools, that question matters far more than whether the building is labeled “district” or “charter.”
Aligning authority with accountability
At the heart of Texas’ partnership framework is a simple principle: Those responsible for results must also have the authority to change how the work is done.
Through performance-based agreements, districts retain public oversight while nonprofit operators gain authority over staffing, curriculum, scheduling and daily operations. If results improve, the partnership continues. If they do not, the agreement can be terminated. Responsibility is matched with decision-making power.
The idea that structural change can transform struggling schools is not new. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans dramatically expanded charter management of public schools while maintaining public funding and accountability. Over time, student outcomes improved as schools gained greater flexibility over staffing and instruction.
Texas adapted that principle for districts that want to improve existing schools without closing them or replacing them entirely. Other states have begun exploring similar approaches.
Tennessee’s InnovationZones, Colorado’s Innovation Schools, and district partnership campuses in Louisiana and Indiana reflect the same insight: Schools improve faster when autonomy and accountability move together.
Partnership operators do not open new schools. They take responsibility for improving existing ones — often campuses that have struggled for years under traditional structures. For communities seeking improvement without closing schools outright, the model offers a pragmatic path forward.
Results can come faster than expected
Education policy often assumes that meaningful turnaround takes decades. That assumption lowers urgency and discourages bold action.
Experience suggests otherwise when leaders have the authority to act.
In Jasper, Texas, Parnell Elementary — a campus that had received failing ratings for years — entered a partnership with Third Future Schools. Within one year the school improved from an F rating to a B.
Turnaround work is demanding, and improvement is never guaranteed. But when schools gain the flexibility to reorganize staffing, instruction and schedules around student needs, progress can happen far more quickly than conventional wisdom suggests.
And for the kids attending these underperforming schools, turnaround speed is crucial.
A reform Washington should encourage
Texas’ partnership framework offers a practical model other states should consider.
Federal policy could help accelerate that progress — not by creating new programs, but by making clearer use of the authority that already exists under federal law.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states are required to intervene in chronically underperforming schools and are given broad flexibility in how those interventions are designed. District-operator partnerships like those used in Texas should be explicitly recognized as an approved turnaround strategy within that framework.
Clarifying that authority would give states greater confidence to pursue partnership models while maintaining local control over public schools.
Washington can also play a constructive role by highlighting and evaluating the results of these efforts.
Rigorous independent research — similar to the federal government’s evaluation of instructional and curriculum reforms — would help policymakers understand when partnership models are most effective and how they can be implemented successfully. None of these steps would impose a national mandate. They would simply give states more room to pursue structural solutions that have already begun to show promise.
A rare opportunity for bipartisan agreement
Education policy often divides along predictable political lines. Democrats emphasize investment in public schools, while Republicans focus on reform and accountability. Partnership-based reform offers a rare opportunity to do both.
These models keep schools public and open to all students while pairing additional resources with performance contracts, operational autonomy and clear expectations for results.
For families whose children attend struggling schools, the debate is far less ideological: They want to know whether their children are learning more this year than last. Texas’ partnership framework offers one practical way to accelerate that progress by preserving public oversight while creating the structural conditions necessary for improvement.
If the goal is better outcomes for students, the conversation should move beyond defending systems and toward building structures that deliver results. Texas has shown one way to do it — the rest of the country should take notice.
