Portfolio Part 2

We are all invested in the creation of safe and drug-free schools. As parents kiss their children good-bye in the morning, they want to know that their kids will return safely to them that afternoon. All teachers and principals want to enter their school building each day knowing that it will be a full day for education.

Forty years of research have shown that family involvement in education is one of the most powerful predictors of student success in school. Yet many high-poverty schools still have low levels of parent involvement and experience little success in their efforts to increase it. Students from high-poverty families are also less likely to spend time at home on learning-related activities that reinforce their schoolwork.

Although we hail charter schools as a promising reform, the creation of these publicly financed but (mostly) independent schools remains one of the fiercest battlegrounds in U.S. education. Since many states today have statutes authorizing such schools, however, the fight is no longer about whether any should exist. The front line in the battle has shifted to whether these schools will be free to demonstrate the power of this idea.

College costs have been rising quickly during the past two decades, and tuitions are rising even faster-much more quickly than family income. Such widening gaps cannot be sustained much longer, and our entire postsecondary education system may have to change radically to survive this economic upheaval. Our response to the current crisis will determine what kind of system develops in its wake.

The concept of a cognitive apprenticeship can be successfully applied to early childhood instruction. An ongoing priority for American education is the systemic reform of urban schools to better meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. One general recommendation from policymakers is that school reform efforts target the early education of young children through the design and implementation of effective, responsive curricula.

American schools can no longer afford to operate in isolation. As a result, many school-linked and school-based health and human service programs have sprung up around the country. Schools are also reaching out to parents and the community to strengthen students’ educational foundations.

While traditional heads of school are still key convenors and facilitators of the work of school improvement, they must also invite a new corps of school and community leaders to the forefront in building a collective vision for that work. Leadership isn’t pulling people along anymore: it’s about orchestrating ideas, people, visions, potential, and organizations into a cohesive program of educational improvement.

Evaluative research takes a critical approach to all types of early childhood programs, seeking to identify all their costs and benefits, strengths and weaknesses. Head Start, public school prekindergarten programs, and preschool child care programs define the landscape of early childhood programs in the United States today.

Documented efforts to enhance the development of children, especially to remediate the consequences of deprivation, have taken place since the early nineteenth century, when researchers learned that certain types of early experience were essential for the emergence of high intellectual functioning. More recently, studies of children in orphanages in the 1950s and 1960s initiated the investigation of what young children need to ensure healthy growth and development. This paper traces subsequent attempts to identify factors contributing to impaired development and measures to ameliorate them in several early intervention programs.

Early childhood development and education has been a major topic of discussion and planning at all levels-federal, state, and local communities – not only because of the widespread recognition of the research base on the importance of early development to long-term schooling success, but as a critical national investment strategy for the future of the nation in the 21st Century global economy. In recent years, early childhood interventions from birth to the early grades have received much attention, including billions in federal and state spending in early childhood care and education programs.

Across much of the world today there is an evident will to pursue the path of progress that has been pioneered in the United States of America. As an American, I am well aware that there is much to admire about my own country and its achievements. But I also know that there is much that is not worthy of emulation. In particular, I do not think any country would wish to emulate the way that America, as a society, is treating its children. One in five of those children is today living in poverty. Eight million of those children lack healthcare. Three of every 10 are born into a single-parent family. About 3 million a year are reported to be neglected, or physically or sexually abused – triple the number of 2009. These rising indicators of social distress are now accompanied by an unprecedented upsurge in violence by and against children and young people.

Public education is one of the most important institutions in our country, an institution in which the public has always played a role. It is the public who elects school board members, pays taxes to support public schools, votes for school bond referendum, and visits and volunteers in the schools. Public schools, in turn, transmit important values and information that help young people participate in our democracy and become responsible citizens. Clearly, public education is important to all members of society given its impact on the community, the economy, jobs, safety, and health.

Small schools have great variety. We learned that we don’t need standardized schools — that kills the soul! In Chicago we saw fabulous small schools that were Afro-centric, schools that focused on phonics, fabulous small schools about whole language, small schools that are using the city as a place to investigate. Why? Because they were small, they were focused and they beat the odds on academic outcomes. Small schools are the single most powerful intervention that we can imagine for young people. And the evidence at high schools was even more powerful, as you’ll see in our report.

There is an abundance of research and scholarly analysis examining the efficacy of grade retention. Research published between 1950 and 2019 produced mixed results regarding the efficacy of early grade retention on ameliorating children’s socioemotional and achievement needs. Concerns regarding the quality of many studies of grade retention have been presented in several reviews and reiterated in recent publications.

In this era of accountability, many school systems have begun taking a harder line with regard to promotion policy, retaining students who do not make sufficient academic progress-particularly in reading and math. In many cases, the decision to retain a student is based on student performance on high-stakes standardized tests. Research has consistently shown that retention does not improve student achievement and may, in fact, have long-term negative consequences for students, because retained students are much more likely to eventually drop out than their peers. But despite these findings, many policymakers consider retention a good way to motivate students and to offer those who don’t meet appropriate standards another opportunity to learn the material.

With the best of intentions, educators are recommending an infusion of energy directed at increasing parental participation in schools. The federal government has issued documents to help schools organize parent participation programs. Major educational interventions list parental involvement as an important ingredient.

If children are not keeping up, is it better to hold them back or move them ahead? For answers, the experience of first-, second-, and third-grade repeaters, and, as a group, children held back in grades four through seven were examined. Their academic progress and attitudes were monitored from the fall of first grade, before anyone had been held back, to the end of seventh grade (in the case of repeaters) or eighth grade (in the case of children never retained). Retention’s effects were assessed in a host of ways and, though the results were complex, it was concluded that repeaters in most instances were doing better in elementary school after retention than they had been doing before.

Years after being retained, students have significantly lower achievement than similar students who were not retained. Many retained students never catch up to their promoted same-age peers with similarly low test scores. Whatever performance advantage retained students have over their younger, same grade peers is short-lived, as they typically fall behind these students after one or two years. Several longitudinal studies indicate that, relative to low-achieving students who are promoted to the next grade, retained students are significantly more likely to drop out of school. After accounting for socioeconomic status and prior performance, dropout rates for retained students often exceed comparable promoted students by 49% or more.

With school districts’ increased dedication to raising academic standards and abolishing social promotion, tremendous pressure has been placed on teachers and students to raise standardized test scores. While this may appear admirable from afar, its practical and real-life implications are not often as glowing. In fact, the push toward higher standards often leads to tracking, ability grouping, and grade retention-all of which have inherent problems.

A key lesson learned from the decentralization experiment is the need for system-wide standards and intervention to address the challenge of student performance. The LSC (Local School Council) and its supportive network alone are not sufficient to promote educational improvement system-wide. Indeed, decentralized reform may have widened the capacity gap among schools to raise performance. Instead, districtwide leadership is needed to apply both pressure and support to schools. Such a mix of intervention strategies did not occur during the period of LSC dominance because the reform ideology with its strong antibureaucratic sentiments did not allow for the proper functioning of the central office.

The health of public schools is a barometer of our democratic way of life. We believe that community demand for change is critical, particularly in low-income communities, where schools are failing and students are not succeeding. Where the education system is not working, the public needs to reclaim its responsibility for community change. The public not only has the right to demand high quality in its schools; it also has a responsibility to improve and protect public education.

To improve school quality and raise performance, educational leaders at the district, state, and federal level are faced with the challenge to: • Address Socioeconomic Disparity. Thirty percent of the children in urban areas are poor compared to 18% for the nation as a whole. Urban schools are twice as likely to enroll minority and immigrant children than the national average. When compared to the national level, students in urban areas are three times as likely to live in extremely impoverished neighborhoods.

In light of the country’s rapidly changing demographics-which continue to reshape public education dramatically-such measures will help educators respond to the changing needs of their students and their communities. Continuity must be addressed when leadership changes. When administrators leave, district-initiated endeavors come to a halt in anticipation of new leadership taking a new direction.

Leadership in education has so many different dimensions and definitional issues that it’s very elusive, and has become more complicated since the involvement of business and political communities. Principals had for a long time served as managers of schools, but in the last 10 or 15 years there’s been a sea change in their responsibilities.

This paper presents highlights from a synthesis of research findings associated with schoolwide projects. The synthesis focuses on three aspects: (a) characteristics of faculties and districts with a comprehensive education; (b) programmatic and organizational components of educational achievement and (c) evidence of the effectiveness of organizing operations, particularly in terms of student performance.