What's Hot?

The following is a list of selections recently in the national or local news pertinent to school reform and student achievement. The documents and websites listed are not created or supported by The Texas Turnaround Center.

A Promise Kept: USDE Video Examines Los Angeles High School Turnaround Model
A new U.S. Department of Education video tells the story of Locke Senior High School in Los Angeles, California, where the non-profit organization Green Dot has implemented a school turn-around model focused on ensuring students achievement and college or career readiness upon graduation.

College and Career Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
In this report, Education Sector policy analyst Chad Aldeman notes that the best way to measure whether students are prepared for college or a career is by looking at what actually happens when students arrive at their intended destination. The report cites examples of schools that did make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) under NCLB, yet whose students were not successful in college. It offers suggestions on ways states could use existing data systems to create richer, more multi-dimensional measures. Click here for a short video primer of the report.

Common Standards: New Critiques Urge Changes
Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.

Educate to Innovate Campaign
President Obama recently launched a new campaign designed to improve the participation and performance of America’s students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Called Educate to Innovate, the campaign builds on Obama’s pledge to use his position to encourage students to study and consider careers in the STEM fields and elevate those students from the middle to the top, worldwide.

Gauging the Gaps: A Deeper Look at Student Achievement
The Education Trust's brief illustrates the pitfalls of one-dimensional analyses of achievement gaps and concludes that it's essential to analyze gaps from four perspectives in order to gain a comprehensive picture of equity. Using state-level NAEP data, the analysis found five states emerge as clear leaders: Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas and Vermont.

Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation's Best Charter Schools
This Education Sector report takes an objective look at how prepared the nation's best charter schools are to meet the challenge of rapid expansion.

Inaugural Overview of States’ ActionsTo Leverage Data To Improve Student Success: 2009-10 Progress Report on State Data Systems and Use
According to the Data Quality Campaign’s annual survey of states, the states have made remarkable progress in developing longitudinal data systems that can follow student progress over time, from early childhood through 12th grade and into postsecondary education through implementation of the 10 Essential Elements. The 10 State Actions are the fundamental steps states must put in place to change the culture around how data are used to inform decisions to improve system and student performance. Forty-three states have taken three or fewer of the actions, which call for states to expand their data systems to include higher education and workforce information; ensure that the data can be accessed, analyzed and used; and build the capacity of stakeholders to use the data.

Leading for Learning Improvement in Urban Schools
Developed by the University of Washington’s Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy in collaboration with The Wallace Foundation, this report is the first of a series emerging from a national study. This report documents and analyzes learning-focused leadership work in urban schools.

Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago
A recently published book by a group of authors with the Consortium on Chicago School Research outlines five research-based components of successful programs to improve struggling urban schools that have worked in Chicago. Anthony S. Bryk and his co-authors write in "Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago" that turnaround strategies should focus on leadership, strong ties to parents and the community, professional development for teachers, a high-quality learning environment for students, and strong instruction and materials. .

Quality Counts 2010
Education Week’s annual report card for states, Quality Counts, gathers a wide range of statistics about each state’s demographics, labor force, educational attainment and education inputs to describe “the condition of education” in the fifty states.

Reducing Behavior Problems in the Elementary School Classroom
Designed for elementary school educators and school- and district-level administrators, this guide published by USDE Institutue of Educatin Sciences offers prevention, implementation, and schoolwide strategies that can be used to reduce problematic behavior that interferes with the ability of students to attend to and engage fully in instructional activities.

Restructuring 'Restructuring': Improving Interventions for Low-Performing Schools and Districts
The Obama administration has made “turnaround” a major priority—vowing to fundamentally restructure and reshape the nation’s lowest-performing schools. In this Education Sector report, Senior Policy Analyst Rob Manwaring examines what happens after states identify schools as low-performing. He documents how few states and districts use the tools provided to them by NCLB and what policy changes must be made in order to address the administration's challenge.

Stuck Schools: A Framework for Identifying Schools Where Students Need Change—Now
A new Ed Trust report shows schools often lumped together as “low performing” are not all alike. Data from reading and mathematics assessments for elementary and middle schools in ten states show some low-performing schools remain “stuck” year after year. Yet others which started as low performers are among the fastest improvers in their states. Amid conflicting claims about school turnarounds and growing federal investment in struggling schools, this report sheds light on gains, or their absence, in low-performing schools.

The Nation’s Report Car: Trail Urban District Assessment (TUDA) Reading 2009
Most of the 18 U.S. urban school districts participating in an assessment of reading skills scored below the national average, according to results of the 2009 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) released last week by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The TUDA tested representative samples of between 800 and 2,400 fourth and eighth grade students in each of the 18 large school districts to gauge performance in reading. Overall scores in 2009 were lower for most participating districts when compared to the national average. The nation showed a one-point gain at grade 8 but no change in grade 4 from 2007. However, some districts showed progress on TUDA at each grade level. Texas school districts participating in the TUDA were the Austin, Dallas, and Houston school districts.

This School Works for Me: A Guide for America's Leaders
Using a combination of short narrative, charts, and graphs, the guide prepared by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation compresses extensive findings from school districts and their consulting partners into a set of clearly defined actions that courageous and committed school leaders should take.

This School Works for Me: A Guide for Data Analysts
In this guide prepared by the Bill and Melinda Foundation, sata analysts will find descriptions of data needed, as well as the analyses required to identify students at-risk of dropping out, determine how schools compare in meeting the needs of their students, and calculate the cost of various school and program options.

This School Works for Me: An Implementation Guide for School District Administrators
This report presents the results of NAEP’s long-term trend assessments in reading and mathematics that were administered in the 2007–08 school year to students aged 9, 13, and 17. Overall, the national trend in reading showed gains in average scores at all three ages since 2004. Average reading scores for 9- and 13-year-olds increased in 2008 compared to 1971, but the reading score for 17-year-olds was not significantly different. The national trend in mathematics showed that both 9- and 13-year-olds had higher average scores in 2008 than in any previous assessment year. For 17-year-olds, there were no significant differences between the average score in 2008 and those in 1973 or 2004.

Using the Right Data to Determine if High School Interventions Are Working to Prepare Students for College and Careers
The National High School Center released a new report to guide educators in collecting and analyzing valuable student achievement data that can help them determine if and how high school interventions for underprepared students are working to effectively prepare them for college and careers. The report discusses research on the relationship between students' academic preparation gaps in eighth grade and their likelihood of achieving college- and career-readiness by the end of high school. It also explores the datasets that state and local education agencies can create as a way to evaluate the benefits of interventions for students at varying achievement levels, and provides direction for high schools and districts once they obtain student data.

Year in Review: 2009
The USDE published a report of the Obama administration’s efforts to improve education in 2009. Topics covered in the report include the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the Race to the Top program, state-level reform efforts, Title I school improvement grants, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Listening and Learning Tour, and other efforts.