All Posts Tagged With: "student achievement"
Lessons from High-Performing K-12 Schools
If you’ve been looking for K-12 education processes and results to benchmark, check out The Education Trust. Each year it honors high-performing schools with its Dispelling the Myth Awards, about which it writes, “These schools don’t offer simple answers or easy solutions, but several common strategies emerge from their practices. They provide a rich curriculum coupled with strong, focused instruction. They have high expectations for all students. They use data to track student progress and individual student needs. And they employ purposeful professional development to improve teachers’ skills.”
The Education Trust’s Web site offers a number of reports and presentations that use success stories to address everything from value-added data to state accountability systems to the achievement gap between white, minority, and low-income students.
For example, you can download the following PowerPoint presentation: “Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps Between Groups: Lessons from Schools and Districts on the Performance Frontier.” The report begins with positive news about progress in reading and math in elementary and middle schools. The good news doesn’t extend to high school, however, where achievement in both reading and math has been flat since 1984.
And then the news gets worse. Of 29 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the…
15Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEducation: Fix the System
Add the voice of Ben Chavis to those critical of public school leaders. Dr. Chavis spent seven years as principal of the American Indian Public Charter School, transforming it from the worst middle school in Oakland into a high-performing organization. He uses that platform to argue that public schools don’t need more money; they need competent administrators who are held accountable for their performance. (CNN, “Commentary: Who says public schools need more money?” September 9, 2009)
Systems thinking tells us that the system is responsible for 85-95% of an organization’s problems, and since the leaders control the system, they are responsible for those problems. They need to understand how their system works, set goals, identify opportunities to improve, and develop processes that will close the gap between their goals and current performance.
Money is not the answer to these problems, but inadequate financial resources can make it difficult to address them. Schools are being asked to do so much more than in the past to address social and economic issues that have a direct bearing on their ability to educate. Dr. Chavis has given us an example of how this can be done. Other schools, including the five school districts that have received the…
11Sep2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
