Accelerate Program Looking for New School Leaders

The Accelerate Program prepares outstanding educators to lead start-up charter schools that will succeed from the beginning – to help close the achievement gap. Accelerate started in Chicago and has since expanded to New York, Los Angeles and the San-Francisco –Oakland area. 

From now until early April, the Accelerate New School Leadership Program is seeking applicants and nominees to enroll in its two-year professional development program designed to create an elite corps of principals in new charter schools. The opportunity includes a paid summer leadership institute at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, residency in a high-performing charter school and eventually, the chance to lead your own new school.

If you are interested in learning more or applying, visit http://www.alainlocke.org/apply/apply. The application deadline is April 8, 2011.

Report Round-up

Closing the Expectations Gap 2011 by Achieve. This report finds that in the six years since the National Governors Association and Achieve co-sponsored the National Education Summit on high schools, the goal of aligning the expectations for high school graduates with the demands of college and the workplace is the new norm across the United States.

Breaking New Ground: Building a National Workforce Skills Credentialing System from ACT. This report introduces the need and associated benefits for establishing a national workforce credentialing system and emphasizes the importance of getting a critical mass of state, national, and public and private workforce leaders to co-construct a foundational framework to address our national workforce challenges.

Turning Around the Nation’s Lowest-Performing Schools from the Center for American Progress.  This report focuses on five steps that low-performing school districts can take to improve their chances of success.

Ask the Expert: Mariana Haynes

District policies play a considerable role in determining principals’ instructional behaviors and successes in transforming high school culture, according to a new brief released today from the Alliance for Excellent Education. "Meeting the Challenge: The Role of School Leaders in Turning Around the Lowest-Performing High Schools" recommends policies that focus on a schoolwide, systematic approach to improving professional learning and collaborative practices. Mariana Haynes wrote the brief and we recently interviewed her to learn more about the importance of school leadership. Do you have a question for Mariana? Simply, type it in the comments section below and she will do her best to respond. 

What do we know about the impact of school leaders on teaching and student achievement?

Of all school-related factors that impact student achievement, school leadership is second in importance only to classroom instruction. A major report from the Wallace Foundation looks at the way leadership influences student learning by creating the conditions and the expectations in high schools that there will be excellent instruction and a culture of ongoing learning for educators and students in the school. Leader effects are largely indirect and are strengthened by professional communities and the collective influence of all participants in adopting practices that enhance student learning.

Morning Announcements: November 16, 2010

The Washington Post reports on a panel of top educators that is recommending major revisions of teacher training programs. Maryland, California, Colorado, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee have pledged to implement the recommendations. To read more about individual states’ commitments: Check out stories in the Oregonian and the Denver Post.

The Washington Examiner, New York Times, and USA Today all report on a recently released study, from the Council of Great City Schools, finding that the nation’s young black males are in a state of crises. Is the newsletter going to be posted soon? If so I can link to the article in Straight A’s.

Report Round-Up

Competitive Grant Making and Education Reform: Assessing Race to the Top's Current Impact and Future Prospects

Student Learning Expectations Gap Can Be Twice the Size of National Black-White Achievement Gap from the American Institutes for Research. This report finds that the gap in what students are expected to know in each state varies so greatly that the difference in student expectations between the states with the most rigorous assessments and those with the least stringent is twice the size of the national black-white achievement gap.

Degree Completion Beyond Institutional Borders: Responding to the New Reality of Mobile and Nontraditional Learners from the Center for American Progress. This report describes the avenues that colleges, states, and other organizations take to recognize prior learning and transfer credit, and it points out the flaws in these policies that block students from efficiently garnering credit as they move through and among higher education institutions.

Morning Announcements: September 29, 2010

The St. Louis Dispatch writes about the inaugural class of the Ozarks Teacher Corps, a group of southwest Missouri teachers in training who receive $4,000 annual scholarships in exchange for a three-year commitment to work in rural school districts after graduation.

The director of the Public Education Research Institute at Queens University of Charlotte describes how reducing dropouts would provide an economic stimulus in an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he wants to use new methods to evaluate and pay the state's public school teachers, according to the Associated Press.

The Grand Rapids Press editorial board writes, “With apologies to the Realtors who invented the original joke, nearly everybody agrees the three keys to success for Michigan’s economic future are: Education, education, education.”

Report Round-Up: September 24, 2010

The Federal Role in Confronting the Crisis in Adolescent Literacy from the Alliance for Excellent Education. This report calls for the federal government needs to substantially step up its role in promoting strong literacy skills at the middle and high school levels.

Segregation and Exposure to High-Poverty Schools in Large Metropolitan Areas: 2008-09 from study by faculty at the Institute on Urban Health Research at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences. The report ranks racial/ethnic segregation and exposure to high-poverty schools for public, primary school students in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, revealing that black and Hispanic children attend very different schools than do white children and are disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty schools.

Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching by Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller of McKinsey & Company. This report examines teaching programs and strategies in some of the world’s best-performing nations and seeks to outline how adapting those strategies for practice in the United States might reap enormous benefits for the U.S. economy.

Ask the Author: Mariana Haynes

Mariana Haynes, Senior Fellow at the Alliance for Excellent Education, recently wrote The Federal Role in Confronting the Crisis in Adolescent Literacy, a brief on the role that the federal government can play to advocate for a comprehensive, national, and schoolwide focus on K–12 literacy.  We sat down with Mariana to discuss the brief and ask her a few more questions on literacy. Do you have a question for Mariana? Post it in the comments section below and we will be sure you get a response.

What are the differences between the literacy needs of young students versus middle and high school students?

As students move from learning to read to reading to learn, students are asked to perform complex literacy tasks in speaking, listening, reading, and writing in relation to content-area disciplines. As the demands for applied literacy skills in postsecondary settings increase, it is imperative that students receive literacy instruction that is integrated into all subject areas. Students must contend with written material that includes technical vocabulary and concepts unique to mathematics, social sciences, history, and language arts.

Yet, many middle and high school teachers lack the preparation and supports for teaching these skills within their content-area discipline and have minimal resources to draw upon in helping students who struggle to read and write. Large numbers of students cannot understand or evaluate text, provide relevant details, or support inferences about coursework material. Without high-level literacy skills, students will be relegated to the ranks of unskilled workers unable to compete in a global knowledge economy.

Morning Announcements: September 10, 2010

More than 40 percent of Chicago’s public high schools are failing, according to the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Public Schools’ internal documents.

In California, a civil liberties group is suing the state over charges incurred by public school students to use textbooks or take required tests or courses. The group is arguing that the state has failed to protect the right to a free public education. Read more in a story in today’s New York Times.

According to the latest results of a teaching licensing exam in Connecticut, colleges and universities that train new teachers are producing too many graduates who don't know how to teach children to read.

More than one-third of Massachusetts students evaluated during the 2008-2009 school year were overweight or obese, according to a report released yesterday.

Yesterday, the Department of Education recognized 304 schools as 2010 National Blue Ribbon Schools.

Morning Announcements: July 30, 2010

Iowa and Tennessee vote to adopt common standards and North Dakota moves forward in making their decision.

In a speech to the National Urban League, President Obama defended the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, Education Week reports.

According to a new report from the Center for American Progress, too many teachers are failing at their jobs and teacher preparation programs are not being held accountable for adequate teacher training.