High Leverage Strategies to Address America's Dropout Crisis: A Guide for Funders

Children and Youth;Education and Literacy

High Leverage Strategies to Address America's Dropout Crisis: A Guide for Funders

This guide is designed to help foundations identify investment opportunities that will have the greatest value in advancing efforts to increase graduation rates. There are many different approaches to increase the graduation rate, ranging from early learning opportunities to youth employment programs. Although members of YTFG make investments all along this continuum, our collaborative work has been to stem the tide of young people flowing out of our high schools without a diploma. The recommendations in this guide are based on our collective experiences as we work to increase the graduation rates of struggling students and those who fall off track to graduation.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America / United States

On Thin Ice: Arts Education in Alaska Schools

Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy

On Thin Ice: Arts Education in Alaska Schools

In 2008 the Alaska State Council on the Arts collaborated with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and the Alaska School Administrators Association to conduct a statewide, comprehensive survey to look what is happening with the arts in our schools.

This first-of-its-kind study was designed to provide useful, baseline data to policy makers, district administrators, parents, teachers, University faculty, business leaders, arts advocates arts organizations and the Alaska community at large. This report dramatically illustrates that there is much to do, to ensure that the #1 goal for all Alaskan students - access to high quality arts experiences as a basic component of their K -- 12 education -- is truly met.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Alaska

On Thin Ice: Arts Education in Alaska Schools

Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy

On Thin Ice: Arts Education in Alaska Schools

In 2008 the Alaska State Council on the Arts collaborated with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and the Alaska School Administrators Association to conduct a statewide, comprehensive survey to look what is happening with the arts in our schools.

This first-of-its-kind study was designed to provide useful, baseline data to policy makers, district administrators, parents, teachers, University faculty, business leaders, arts advocates arts organizations and the Alaska community at large. This report dramatically illustrates that there is much to do, to ensure that the #1 goal for all Alaskan students - access to high quality arts experiences as a basic component of their K -- 12 education -- is truly met.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Alaska

On Thin Ice: Arts Education in Alaska Schools

Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy

On Thin Ice: Arts Education in Alaska Schools

In 2008 the Alaska State Council on the Arts collaborated with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and the Alaska School Administrators Association to conduct a statewide, comprehensive survey to look what is happening with the arts in our schools.

This first-of-its-kind study was designed to provide useful, baseline data to policy makers, district administrators, parents, teachers, University faculty, business leaders, arts advocates arts organizations and the Alaska community at large. This report dramatically illustrates that there is much to do, to ensure that the #1 goal for all Alaskan students - access to high quality arts experiences as a basic component of their K -- 12 education -- is truly met.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Alaska

Teacher Evaluation in Practice: Implementing Chicago's REACH Students

Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor

Teacher Evaluation in Practice: Implementing Chicago's REACH Students

Historically, teacher evaluation in Chicago has fallen short on two crucial fronts: It has not provided administrators with measures that differentiated among strong and weak teachers -- in fact, 93 percent of teachers were rated as Excellent or Superior -- and it has not provided teachers with useful feedback they could use to improve their instruction.

Chicago is not unique -- teacher evaluation systems across the country have experienced the exact same problems.Recent national policy has emphasized overhauling these systems to include multiple measures of teacher performance, such as student outcomes, and structuring the evaluations so they are useful from both talent management and teacher professional development perspectives. Principals and teachers need an evaluation system that provides teachers with specific, practice-oriented feedback they can use to improve their instruction and school leaders need to be able to identify strong and weak teachers. Required to act by a new state law and building off lessons learned from an earlier pilot of an evidence-based observation tool, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) rolled out its new teacher evaluation system -- Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students (REACH Students) -- in the 2012-13 school year.

The REACH system seeks to provide a measure of individual teacher effectiveness that can simultaneously support instructional improvement. It incorporates teacher performance ratings based on multiple classroom observations together with student growth measured on two different types of assessments. While the practice of using classroom observations as an evaluation tool is not completely new, REACH requires teachers and administrators to conceptualize classroom observations more broadly as being part of instructional improvement efforts as well as evaluation; evaluating teachers based on student test score growth has never happened before in the district.

REACH implementation was a massive undertaking. It required a large-scale investment of time and energy from teachers, administrators, CPS central office staff, and the teachers union. District context played an important role and provided additional challenges as the district was introducing other major initiatives at the same time as REACH. Furthermore, the school year began with the first teacher strike in CPS in over 25 years. Teacher evaluation was one of several contentious points in the protracted negotiation, and the specific issue of using student growth on assessments to evaluate teachers received considerable coverage in the media.

This report focuses on the perceptions and experiences of teachers and administrators during the first year of REACH implementation, which was in many ways a particularly demanding year. These experiences can be helpful to CPS and to other districts across the country as they work to restructure and transform teacher evaluation.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Midwestern) / Illinois / Cook County / Chicago

Learning to Imagine

Arts and Culture, Education and Literacy

Learning to Imagine

For the purpose of this discussion, we posit that there are essentially four overarching reasons we educate. They are: preparing students for democratic participation, providing access to knowledge and critical thinking, enabling all students to take advantage of life's opportunities, and enabling students to lead rich and rewarding personal lives. None of these can be achieved fully without attention to the role of imagination. While we acknowledge that not all would agree with our definition of purposes, our comprehensive vision, we believe, can serve our children and our society well.

August 1970

Geographic Focus:

Dance Education in Chicago Public Schools: A Research Study

Arts and Culture, Education and Literacy

Dance Education in Chicago Public Schools: A Research Study

In the summer of 2010, the Chicago Community Trust (CCT) commissioned Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC) to undertake a project to better understand dance education programs offered to Chicago Public School (CPS) students by outside organizations, as well as how they are using the newly released CPS Guide for Teaching and Learning in the Arts. Along with HSDC, three other organizations were commissioned to complete similar projects for the arts disciplines of visual arts, music and theater (The Art Institute of Chicago, Ravinia Festival and The League of Chicago Theaters).

The overarching goal for the initiative was to identify how arts organizations can more effectively serve CPS students through arts education programming. Specifically, this included a better understanding of the current capacity of dance education organizations as well as factors that could improve the quantity and effectiveness of dance education programming for CPS students.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Illinois-Cook County-Chicago

Nurturing California's Next Generation Arts and Cultural Leaders

Arts and Culture, Education and Literacy

Nurturing California's Next Generation Arts and Cultural Leaders

Leaders in the nonprofit arts world, many of them founders and builders of their organizations for decades, will be retiring in unprecedented numbers in the coming years. Organizations could become weaker and destabilized during this transition, a prospect that should be addressed with some urgency. Younger professionals should be able to take on these leadership roles and chart a new course in stressful and changing times. Yet an operational divide between the workplace needs and values of Next Geners and those currently in charge threatens this transition.

It does not help that the nonprofit arts field suffers from a paucity of training and professional degree-granting programs, low pay, long work hours, and inadequate career advancement opportunities. The generation that sparked a powerful nonprofit arts movement more than thirty years ago now wonders about their successors: Are they motivated? Prepared? How can we recruit, train, nurture, and retain them?

This study was commissioned by the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) as part of a large-scale Next Generation Arts Leadership Initiative funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation that aspires to strengthen and retain a new generation of administrative talent in California's nonprofit arts field. It addresses nonprofit arts leaders' desire to know more about their younger colleagues and their experiences as professionals, board members, and volunteers.

To explore the experience of Next Geners, the author developed a survey conducted in the summer of 2010. In this report, Next Gen arts leaders are defined as individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 years who are currently working with a California nonprofit arts organization as administrators, artists or board members and who have worked in the field for less than ten consecutive years. More than 1,300 California Next Geners took the survey and with modest exceptions (under-representation of Latinos, African and Asian-Americans, and men, non-metropolitan regions, and certain art forms), their workplaces are generally representative of the size of and variation within the nonprofit arts sector in the state. For example, some 23% of our Next Gen respondents work for organizations with budgets under $100,000, while 22% work in organizations with budgets over $2 million.

August 1970

Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-California

See More Reports

Go to IssueLab