Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor
This report, the second in a series, describes early results of Wallace's Principal Pipeline Initiative, a multi-year effort to improve school leadership in six urban school districts. The report describes changes in the six districts' practices to recruit, train and support new principals. It also offers early lessons for other districts considering changes to their own principal pipelines.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-Colorado-Denver County-Denver;North America-United States (Southern)-North Carolina-Mecklenburg County-Charlotte;North America-United States (Southern)-Maryland-Prince George;North America-United States (Southern)-Georgia-Gwinnett County;North America-United States (Southern)-Florida-Hillsborough County;North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City
This document is designed to offer practitioners -- teachers, principals, and central office administrators -- models, tools, and examples from the Linked Learning field for developing a performance assessment system. This document describes the challenges and successes practitioners encountered when developing and implementing authentic performance-based assessment practices and systems in Linked Learning pathways as well as the conditions that enabled this work. It is the product of a 1-year study of three grade-level teams, located in three different Linked Learning pathways across California. These teams participated in a 2-year performance assessment demonstration project led by ConnectEd and Envision.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-California
In 2012, FSG and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation published five in-depth case studies on leading blended learning practitioners across the country called "Blended Learning in Practice: Case Studies from Leading Schools". A key question that emerged from this work was how schools can manage the rapid pace of change inherent in blended learning. This case study, a Year 2 follow up in the 2012-13 school year, examines how a rigorous, intentional process for innovation has enabled Summit Public Schools San Jose to continuously improve its blended and whole school learning model.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-California-Santa Clara County-San Jose
Today, there are many new proposals about governance of K-12 Education: The portfolio strategy emphasizes a system of continuous improvement for diverse, autonomous schools governed by performance contracts; devolution models include efforts to expand the role of charter management organizations and other nonprofit providers (Andy Smarick's "Urban School System of the Future," Neerav Kingslad's "Relinquishment"); and school transformation models emphasize the role of third-party support organizations that create K-12 feeder patterns of allied schools (Bill Guenther and Justin Cohen's Mass Insight "Smart Districts" proposal).
Are these really rival proposals as the authors of some are claiming? This idea is misguided; these are complemetns not alternatives.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
We compare two alternative methods to account for the sorting of students into academic tracks. Using data from an urban school district, we investigate whether including track indicators or accounting for classroom characteristics in the value-added model is sufficient to eliminate potential bias resulting from the sorting of students into academic tracks.
We find that accounting for two classroom characteristics -- mean classroom achievement and the standard deviation of classroom achievement -- may reduce bias for middle school math teachers, whereas track indicators help for high school reading teachers. However, including both of these measures simultaneously reduces the precision of the value-added estimates in our context. In addition, we find that while these different specifications produce substantially different value-added estimates, they produce small changes in the tails of value-added distribution.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington
Education and Literacy;Parenting and Families
Are parents an untapped resource in improving and reimagining K -- 12 education in Kansas City? What do they think would enhance student learning and what are they willing to do to help their children get the education they deserve? These are among the questions explored in an in-depth survey of 1,566 parents with children now in public school in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This study finds the majority of parents in the Kansas City area ready, willing and able to be more engaged in their children's education at some level. For communities to reap the most benefit from additional parental involvement, it is important to understand that different parents can be involved and seek to be involved in different ways.
The results of this research, detailed in the following pages, show that nearly a third of the region's parents may be ready to take on a greater role in shaping how local schools operate and advocating for reform in K -- 12 education. These parents say they would be very comfortable serving on committees focused on teacher selection and the use of school resources. Their sense of "parental engagement" extends beyond such traditional activities as attending PTA meetings, coaching sports, volunteering for bake sales, chaperoning school trips and seeing that their children are prepared for school each day. Yet, despite their broad interest in a deeper, more substantive involvement in shaping the region's school systems, relatively few of these "potential transformers" have actually participated in policy-oriented activities in the past year.
Moreover, this survey finds that even though the majority of parents seem less inclined to jump into school policy debates, many say they could do more to support local schools in the more traditional school parent roles.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Missouri-Platte County;North America-United States (Midwestern)-Missouri-Jackson County-Kansas City;North America-United States (Midwestern)-Missouri-Clay County;North America-United States (Midwestern)-Missouri-Cass County;North America-United States (Midwestern)-Kansas-Wyandotte County-Kansas City
Education and Literacy;Parenting and Families
The Department of Education's ("Department") decisions to close or co-locate schools frequently involves the loss of critical space and programs, which can have serious impacts on students' education. Historically, in making these decisions the Department has a poor track record of soliciting and incorporating parental and community input. Despite new parental engagement procedures added to the law in 2009 to facilitate greater parental consultation in major school change decisions, this year's story does not seem to be markedly different. The Department treated these hearings as procedural hurdles in order to satisfy the letter of the law, rather than an opportunity to engage in a productive dialogue about the impacts of proposed school closures and co-locations on students and what is in the best interests of affected students.
By examining the New York State Education Law, Educational Impact Statements (EIS), transcripts from public hearings, and by conducting a parent survey of 873 parents at 34 schools affected by co-locations, the report concludes that the Department's parental engagement process provided insufficient information and left too many questions unanswered questions about how students and the school community will be affected by these major school decisions.
The report's key finding is that the EIS -- the official document assessing the impact that a proposed change will have on school services -- does not provide adequate information for members of the school community to understand and comment about how students will be affected by these decisions. This finding is consistent with the courts' recent decision that the school closure process is flawed.
Further, if not well-planned and coordinated, closures and co-locations can disrupt students' education and decrease their access to school facilities such as classrooms, gymnasiums and cafeterias.
December 1969
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York
