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 is most recognized nationally for his work on K-12 education policy and innovation, which he has focused on since the early 1980s. Kolderie was instrumental in the design and passage of the nation’s first charter school law in Minnesota in 1991, and has since worked on the design and improvement of charter legislation in over seventeen states. He has written about the charter idea and its progress in a variety of publications, and is the author of Creating the Capacity for Change: How and Why Governors and Legislatures are Opening a New-Schools Sector in Public Education (Education Week Press, 2005).

Kolderie recieved a BA from Carleton College and MPA from Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University. Kolderie was previously executive director of the Twin Cities Citizens League, a reporter and editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.