The U.S. system of urban public schooling is undergoing the most significant and exciting structural transformation of the last 100 years. New models and a laser focus on results and human capital have created proof points around the country, showing us that closing the urban student achievement gap is not just a dream, but a reality. These exciting breakthroughs are being fueled by some of America's most talented, innovative, and civically minded men and women. This report finds that as demand for new, autonomous and innovative schools begins to snowball, there is a real threat of a leadership talent gap -- and talent is the scarce resource that could define the success or failure of this hope-inspiring movement.

This annual report includes information about the Broad Foundation's grantmaking and philanthropic activities, including a letter from the directors, overviews of the work in the areas of education, science, and the arts, information about grants, financial statements, and information about the team, founders, and board of directors of the organization.

Over the past three decades, countless educational, cultural, and philanthropic leaders have worked tirelessly to improve access to the arts for all students in Chicago Public Schools. Since its inception in 2011, Ingenuity has been working in partnership with these same leaders toward the goal of an arts education for every student in every CPS school. Ingenuity underpins its work by gathering a deep set of data that provides a clear understanding of the specific arts needs of each school and the district as a whole. This report presents findings from the first year of comprehensive data collection, the 2012 -- 13 school year, and sets the baseline against which Ingenuity will annually measure district-wide efforts to expand arts instruction.

Nearly four hundred schools participated in this data collection, which makes this report the most current, comprehensive view of arts education in Chicago. This report also offers an analysis of progress on the CPS Arts Education Plan and shows data related to its implementation in schools. The key to looking at the state of arts in the city's schools is taking a closer look at some of the Plan's high-level goals, which stand out as central to its overall progress.

• Make the arts a core subject by dedicating 120 minutes of arts instruction per week in elementary schools. (1a)
• Create a system to track the quantity of elementary-level arts instruction. (5a)
• Set minimum staffing requirements in the arts at one certified full-time employee per school or an improved ratio. (1d)
• Require each school to maintain a budget for the arts. (6a)
• Match at least one community arts partner to every school in collaboration with an arts, or other instructor. (4b)
• Launch the Creative Schools Certification to establish school and network-level supports to help principals plan for and implement the arts. (3c)
• Integrate the arts into the school progress report card. (5d)

Never before has more been asked of State Education Agencies (SEAs), commonly known as state departments of education. In recent years, policymakers at the state and federal level have viewed the SEA as the default entity for implementing new and sweeping K -- 12 initiatives -- everything from Race to the Top grants and ESEA waivers to teacher evaluation reform and digital learning.

But SEAs were designed -- and evolved over decades -- to address a relatively narrow set of tasks: distributing state and federal dollars, monitoring the use of these funds, and overseeing the implementation of federal and state education programs. They were not created -- nor have they developed the core competencies -- to drive crucial reforms. Accordingly, we argue that despite the best efforts of talented, energetic leaders, SEAs will never be able to deliver the reform results we need.

But there is an alternative. We should view the SEA through the lens of Reinventing Government

(1993), the path-breaking book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler. In short, Osborne and Gaebler call for state agencies to "steer" more and "row" less. Here, we call for federal and state leaders to apply their thesis to SEAs, scaling back the tasks SEAs perform and empowering nongovernmental organizations to take up the slack.

We offer the "4Cs" model (control, contract, cleave, and create) for rethinking state-level K -- 12 reform work. In practice, this means pursuing activities on two parallel tracks. On one, we should make the SEA a far leaner organization, able to execute a narrow set of activities. On the other, we should foster the growth of a new state-level reform ecosystem composed of a range of entities -- primarily independent public entities or nonprofits -- able to carry out key reforms.

Evaluation brief about professional development in McKnight's early literacy grantee school sites. Researched and prepared under contract by SRI International and the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the U of M; part of McKnight's efforts to use research, field-building, and advocacy to increase the percentage of Twin Cities students reading proficiently by the end of third grade.

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.

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.