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I N N O V A T O R |
News about high school innovation
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July 31, 2009
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Welcome to INNOVATOR, a bimonthly report on high school change in North Carolina from the North Carolina New Schools Project. INNOVATOR informs practitioners, policy makers, and friends of public education about high school innovation in North Carolina as well as success stories and research from across the nation.
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Common academic standards in English, math get first look
An effort to develop a set of common academic standards in English and math reached a key waypoint earlier this month with the completion of the first draft of a definition of college- and career readiness in the two core subjects.
The document, which has been circulating on the Web, is a working draft intended to guide a standards-writing process that eventually will include grade-level detail spelling out which skills and knowledge students should master as they progress through school. The draft defines key skills, concepts and principles in English and math that students need to succeed in college and work.
North Carolina is one of 46 states that have joined the standards-setting effort, which is led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.
The two organizations, along with other players, are expected to spend the rest of the year or longer reviewing and refining the standards before a final version is offered for endorsement. Ultimately, individual state education leaders will have the last word on whether to adopt the common guidelines for their own states.
Still, the first glimpse of the emerging standards drew swift reaction from within the broader education community. Education Week reported that Core Knowledge, an organization that promotes strong focus on specific content, posted the draft document on its website and criticized it as emphasizing skills over content. But others offered a more favorable reception, Education Week reported, with the International Reading Association, American Institutes for Research and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics offering generally supportive comments.
- Read the preamble to the draft standards here.
- Read the draft English standards here.
- Read the draft math standards here.
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Become a fan of NCNSP on Facebook; join the discussion
North Carolina New Schools Project now has its own Facebook page.
If you are a Facebook user already, become a fan today and contribute to the
conversation. If not, you can follow the page without joining Facebook,
but you won't be able to post your comments or content. Either way, please take a look here. Back to top
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Report urges stimulus funds to help solve dropout crisis
A new report urges the federal government to focus Race to the Top economic stimulus funding on efforts to boost graduation rates in struggling high schools -- particularly those located in 17 states including North Carolina.
The report, Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools, examines conditions in the group of 17 "make or break" states because they account for about 70 percent of the nation's dropouts. The report was released earlier this month by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and Jobs for the Future, a national partner of the North Carolina New Schools Project.
Some of the states that were studied, such as New York and Illinois, the report explains, have a dense concentration of struggling high schools in one or two big cities. Another group of states, such as Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, face a statewide crisis where low-graduation high schools are widespread across the state. North Carolina, the report says, is one of eight states that also has a statewide spread of high schools with low graduation rates, but where such schools represent a relatively small percentage of all high schools. More specifically, North Carolina is one of three states where more than half the schools are in rural communities.
The report points to North Carolina and the other seven states with a moderate statewide spread of low graduation-rate high schools as being those that are "perhaps best positioned for progress." Action by the state -- as opposed to local districts or the federal government -- is likely to be effective, the report argues.
"Federal officials should encourage states in this category to play an active role," the report recommends, "and federal incentive funding could help develop statewide strategies, including a focus on helping impacted districts develop dropout prevention, intervention, and recovery programs and implement new school designs, especially ones tailored to students at high risk of dropping out."
The report calls the Race to the Top funds "a once-in-a-generation" chance to make good progress in solving the nation's graduation crisis. In particular, the report urges attention to four key areas that would help make a difference:
- Require states seeking Race to the Top funding to use analytic data on graduation rates and low graduation-rate high schools as part of their plans for turning around failing schools.
- Build the capacity of states, districts and schools to implement appropriate high school reform strategies.
- Designate additional federal innovation funding for the development and replication of effective schools designs to use in transforming or replacing low graduation-rate high schools.
- Target federal financing to high schools, districts and states with the most pressing dropout problems.
View a webinar presentation with the authors of the report
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Stronger federal role needed in school innovation, reports say
Two reports this summer from the Alliance for Excellent Education make a case for the federal government to do more to improve high schools nationwide by adopting accountability measures that are more in synch with college- and career-readiness and by more effectively promoting and supporting whole-school reform. Both reports were issued in advance of the upcoming debate in Washington on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which governs the federal school accountability measures under No Child Left Behind. The first of the two reports, Moving Beyond AYP: High School Performance Indicators, argues for measures that better reflect the national goal of graduating all students ready for college and careers and that can better help educators plan and develop strategies for getting them there. The report says that the performance of schools should be measured by criteria that evidence shows is predictive both of high school graduation and college- and career-readiness. They include attendance, course success, on-track to-graduation status, course-taking patterns, success on college- and career-ready assessments, post-secondary success rates and school climate. The second of the reports, Whole-School Reform: Transforming the Nation's Low-Performing High Schools, outlines the rationale for federal policy that would provide greater support for innovative schools. The way school performance is measured needs to be refined, as for all high schools, the report argues, but innovative, whole-school, approaches must also be judged by their progress to allow sufficient time for the reform to show results. The report underscores the general findings of research that shows it takes several years for whole-school reforms to have a significant impact on student performance. Two key reasons are cited: First, at least four years are need for the first class of students to graduate under the innovative approach. Second, performance measures under No Child Left Behind aren't "well suited to measuring interim progress toward improvement goals in high schools." Back to top |
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INNOVATOR is produced
by the North Carolina New Schools Project, an initiative of the Office of the
Governor and the Education Cabinet with the support of the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation and other businesses and foundations. For story suggestions or to opt out of receiving
this e-mail report, please send an e-mail to innovator@newschoolsproject.org or call Todd
Silberman at (919) 277-3760.
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