America's Promise Report: "Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic"
Posted on 14 Dec | 0 comments
"Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic", released by America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at John Hopkins University, outlines that we can end the dropout epidemic, even in schools from lower-income, urban and rural districts that many previously thought were hopeless.
Important progress is being made on a range of reforms, policies, and practices at all levels that will help ensure more students graduate from high school, ready for college and productive work. Although this is producing real results, including an increase in the national graduation rate, the pace is too slow.
The report recognizes this and calls for a ‘Civic Marshall Plan’ to meet the goal set by President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan earlier this year to increase the U.S. graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020. Furthermore, the report outlines the benchmarks to ensure the attainment of those goals, and focuses on bringing dedicated people to help school districts and states accelerate improvement.
McKinsey Releases Report: "How The World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better"
Posted on 14 Dec | 0 comments
And what must a system with good performance
do to become excellent?
In a new report published by McKinsey & Company, "How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better", these questions and many more are addressed.
The report analyzes 20 education systems from around the world and examines how each has achieved significant, sustained, and widespread gains in student outcomes, as measured by international and national assessments. Based on more than 200 interviews with stakeholders in school systems and an analysis of some 600 interventions they carried out, the report provides comprehensive research on global school system reforms -- reform elements that can be replicated in school systems elsewhere.
This report is a follow-up to the 2007 report, “How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top”, which examined the common attributes of high-performing school systems.
Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and retaining top third graduates to a career in teaching
Posted on 15 Nov | 0 comments
Improving teacher effectiveness to lift student achievement has become
a major theme in U.S. education. Most efforts focus on improving the
effectiveness of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the
best performers and dismissing the least effective. Attracting more
young people with stronger academic backgrounds to teaching has received
comparatively little attention.
McKinsey’s experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the U.S. debate. In a new report, “Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ,” McKinsey reviews the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world—Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that pursue this strategy if the United States decided it was worthwhile.
The report also includes new market research with nearly 1,500 current top-third students and teachers. It offers the first quantitative research-based answer to the question of how the U.S. could substantially increase the portion of new teachers each year who are higher caliber graduates, and how this could be done in a cost-effective way.
Raising the Bar: Expect More, Achieve More
Posted on 13 Oct | 0 comments
Partnership
for Learning is pleased to announce the fourth in a series of reports
on how Washington state can build an education system that prepares all
students to succeed in college and the world of work.This week: The Power of College and Career Ready Standards, Assessments and Graduation Requirements
Now, more than ever, a high-quality education is essential for success in college and careers. In the next decade, nearly 80 percent of job openings in the United States will require education beyond the high school level. Without the skills to succeed in college or in careers, America's high school graduates will face a harsh reality: fewer career options with limited opportunities to earn a living wage.
To learn more, read the report.
The New Teacher Project Releases "Teacher Evaluation 2.0"
Posted on 06 Oct | 0 comments
Almost everyone agrees that teacher evaluations are broken, and fixing
them is critical to building a thriving teacher workforce. In 2009, The Widget Effect
documented how poorly-designed teacher evaluation systems rate all
teachers as “good” or "great" and provide little useful feedback on
classroom performance.
Since then, states and school districts have begun to revamp outdated systems by passing new legislation and forging groundbreaking collective bargaining agreements with teachers’ unions.
The dilemma education leaders now face is, “How?” How can they avoid the pitfalls of past evaluation systems and create new ones that become useful tools for teachers and school leaders?
Teacher Evaluation 2.0 tackles this key question. It proposes six design standards that any rigorous and fair teacher evaluation system should meet. It offers a blueprint for better evaluations that can help every teacher succeed in the classroom—and give every student the best chance at success.
"Teacher Quality: What You Need To Know" Guidebook and Website
Posted on 29 Sep | 0 comments
The Joyce Foundation has released "Teacher Quality: What You Need to Know," a guidebook and website for improving the performance of our nation's school teachers. This resource provides tools and materials to assist parents, community leaders, teachers, school administrators, and policy makers in identify excellent teaching and, in additon, outlines steps to take to improve teacher quality.
Using Competency-Based Evaluation to Drive Teacher Excellence: Lessons from Singapore
Posted on 27 Sep | 0 comments
In collaboration with the Joyce Foundation, Public Impact has released an in-depth comparative analysis of the teacher evaluation systems used by the United States and Singapore. This report highlights the stark differences between the two systems and the grasp results that are seen when a comprehensive student competency-based evaluation model is implemented, as is the case in Singapore.
As Washington state engages in the two-year pilot study to develop a new teacher and princpal evaluation model, it is reports like this that the state must carefully analyze and consider during the design and implementation phase of the pilot study.
Is Washington State Still Waiting for Superman?
Posted on 22 Sep | 0 comments
The documentary cites national statistics and other states’ statistics,
but it may leave Washington viewers wondering, “How does our state stack
up?” The University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public
Education has prepared a short guide
that presents important facts about the state of education in
Washington, as well as ideas for what parents and communities can do to
get involved.
The guide is available at www.crpe.org.
Frontrunners in Reform: Who's Racing to the Top?
Posted on 19 Aug | 0 comments
For a summary of Round Two Race to the Top Finalist applications, as
well as predictions for winners, please view our analysis.
