The UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools recently published: Turning Around, Transforming, and Continuously Improving Schools, a policy report that takes a critical look at the school turnaround models and the current federal priorities illustrated by Race to the Top, the School Improvement Grants and the US DOE's Blueprint for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Findings highlight the ongoing marginalization of practices (e.g., student and learning supports) that directly address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging disconnected students. The analyses highlight the need for federal school improvement policy to shift from the two-component framework currently dominating school improvement thinking to a three-component framework, which includes the critical aspects of engagement and learning supports.
The report concludes that only by unifying student and learning supports will it be feasible to develop a comprehensive system to directly address many of the complex factors interfering with schools accomplishing their mission. And only by developing such a system will it be feasible to create school environments that foster successful, safe, and healthy students and staff. School climate is emphasized as an important quality of this system that ensures schools are dedicated not only to instruction and management/governance, but to essential learning supports as well. We at CSEE, strongly believe that school climate is an integral link to student success, and provide comprehensive assessments, targeted professional development supports, and free resources to support schools in this effort.
What do you think encompasses a truly successful school improvement system? How is your school or district meeting the needs of students and staff?
If you haven't read it yet, be sure to check out Sam Chaltain's excellent article on school accountability and performance posted at the Huffington Post. Sam is a major educational leader who wears many hats: he's a member of the National School Climate Council; an educator; the National Director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, a DC-based major education think tank; and the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, a national organization that equips local educators with leadership development, coaching and other supports. He's also the recent author of American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community.
As a college student in a time of economic crisis, I cannot help but be concerned about my future. Of all of the challenges that I will soon be facing in the “real world,” it never occurred to me that I have already overcome a challenge that every year 1.2 million students do not; I have graduated from high school. The high school dropout rate in the United States is alarming, approximately 7,000 high school students drop out every day. For years, schools have published misleading and inaccurate graduation rates, giving the American public a false impression of the dropout epidemic. Today, districts and schools are bringing to light the seriousness of the issue by using real time data to accurately assess graduation rates and also to identify what causes students to drop out.
Most recently, the Bridgespan Group published a study called, “Portland Public Schools: From Data and Decisions to Implementation and Results on Dropout Prevention.” The study stemmed from the fact that the Portland Public Schools (PPS) had data that they could not ignore: 47% of the students who had dropped out of the class of 2004 could have been identified in the 9th grade using some basic indicators. Dubbed the “9th grade initiative,” PPS aimed to identify academic priority students by name in the 8th grade, and focus on the two key factors that are shown to influence student’s chances of graduating: the number of courses failed and the number of unexcused absences in the 9th grade. In one calendar year (2007-2008), PPS made significant progress in helping students transition from the 8th to 9th grade, setting the path for what will hopefully be a successfully completed four years of high school.