LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

ABOUT REL APPALACHIA


In our last newsletter, we gave an overview of the research alliances that we work with to serve the Appalachia region. These alliances are focused on three major themes: turning around low-achieving schools, ensuring college and career readiness, and building effective teachers and leaders. The ultimate purpose of our collaboration with the alliances is to ensure that our efforts provide applicable and tangible insights and resources to help educators and decision makers meet their goals. As researchers and technical assistance providers, we want to be responsive to the region's needs.

Now that we have spent the past few months getting to know our alliances, we are shifting our efforts to collaborating with them to create useful data profiles and logic models. Though both of these terms may sound technical, they are actually very practical and effective tools for developing focused strategies and allocating limited educational resources.

Read on to learn how this work can help your schools, districts, and policymakers enhance their efforts to maximize student success. Also check out our Recent Reports and Research section for additional recent findings that relate to low-achieving schools, college and career readiness, and teacher effectiveness.


Robert D. Muller
, Ed.D.
Director, REL Appalachia


REL Appalachia
is one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories across the nation funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

The mission of REL Appalachia is to conduct empirical research and bring evidence-based information to policymakers and practitioners as they strive to improve educational outcomes. Read more on our website.

ASK A REL


Ask A REL
is an education information service connecting the education community with the Regional Educational Laboratories. This service has allowed RELs to provide quick-turnaround responses to regional needs for education information. Click here to submit a question. By using this link, you will enter the Ask A REL page hosted by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences.

LOGIC MODELS

REGIONAL AND NATIONAL EVENTS


For specific programs and goals that the alliances are working on, logic models provide an assessment and articulation of the following:

  • Inputs: Resources and investments that schools, districts, and alliances can work with to develop and implement programs and policies aimed at enhancing student achievement.
  • Activities: Interventions, processes, strategies, and methods related to educational success goals—the plan for what should be done with available resources.
  • Outputs: The tangible products and results that are expected from activities.
  • Outcomes: The impact and changes that result from the sum of the inputs, activities, and outputs.

How does this translate into actual gains in student success and educational quality? The process of creating a logic model for each alliance helps alliance members to see the connections between the various ways they are allocating their time and resources towards a particular topic or objective of interest. The process results in a graphic that connects, and reveals any gaps or disconnected elements in their existing efforts. The logic model essentially takes a series of "If ... then" statements and conveys them using a chart.

For example, the Kentucky District 180 Alliance is interested in exploring ways to improve the use of instructional time in their schools, as increased learning time is a requirement of two improvement models under the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant (SIG) programs. The logic model we've created provides an aggregated list of all of the resources that are being applied to improving the use of instructional time, including technology, and planning tools that are being used to help teachers and leaders interpret data and apply it to enhancing the effectiveness of time spent in the classroom.

If the tools are being used correctly, then the "output" (as defined in the logic model) should be that teachers are becoming more efficient in the classroom, and the "outcomes" are that more students graduate and are career- and college-ready.

An advantage of the logic model for researchers and alliance members is that it provides ready-made points of investigation. Every initiative and policy should inform each other, and through developing a logic model, alliances can identify gaps between the flow of the four elements, and see where resources and priorities need to be adjusted and supplemented.

A simple way to think of logic models is that they provide a very detailed and illustrated road map. In addition to charting the course, they describe the rationale for the route, when certain landmarks should be reached, and how to keep track of the pace of progress.

DATA PROFILES

RESEARCH LINKS


Having reliable and useful data has become an increasingly important imperative for educators, leaders, and policymakers in the Appalachia region and across the country. This is why we are working with the college and career readiness and school turnaround alliances to create data profiles.

Each turnaround alliance in the Appalachia region works closely with their state's school improvement office staff on a variety of initiatives to serve the needs of low-achieving schools. School turnaround is intended to promote rapid improvement in the lowest-achieving schools and requires specific strategies to reach student achievement goals over a very short period of time (Herman et al., 2008). Because of this, these schools, and the alliances that support them, need to be able to swiftly understand and respond to a variety of factors that can be measured through data.

The goal of the profiles is to provide alliance members with an overview of the types of data that are available to them for a specific topic, and summarize the data to help guide discussions about future priorities. The profiles can also help identify areas where the alliances may want to collect additional information to supplement what is readily available.

The data are designed to address a common challenge that most low-achieving schools face: Despite an abundance of research and guides outlining which types of data are generally useful for schools to collect and analyze, there's a dearth of research-based findings about the specific types of data low-achieving schools need to monitor regularly, and how to use those data effectively to meet their needs.

Consider REL Appalachia's ongoing efforts in Virginia, where we are focused on creating data profiles that inform the alliances' understanding of how to best evaluate school leadership. The Virginia Department of Education is in the process of implementing a new Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) survey, starting in the 2012-2013 school year, which will provide a comprehensive assessment of school leadership.

The IES Practice Guide on Turning Around Low-Performing Schools (Herman et al., 2008) indicates that leaders are an essential part of school improvement. Available literature, however, does not provide specific guidance on how leadership can be monitored or evaluated in ways that will help leaders at low-performing schools adjust or change direction if necessary.

The data profile that we are creating for the Virginia Turnaround Alliance provides examples of useful available data and recommendations on types of data to be collected in the future.

Each alliance's data profile includes a literature review focused on its topic of interest. The profiles also provide a consistent set of guidelines that will not just inform decisions regarding which types of data to collect, but how those data can be used to determine effective ways to prioritize their efforts and resources.

By providing alliances with these profiles, they have a readily available tool to aid their work with districts and individual schools in their state.

RECENT REPORTS & RESEARCH


Forum Guide to Supporting Data Access for Researchers: A State Education Agency Perspective

Author: The National Forum on Education Statistics

This study recommends policies, practices, and templates that can be adopted and adapted by SEAs as they consider how to most effectively respond to requests for data about the education enterprise, including data maintained in longitudinal data systems. These recommendations reflect sound principles for managing the flow of data requests, establishing response priorities, monitoring appropriate use, protecting privacy, and ensuring that research efforts are beneficial to the education agency as well as the research community.

Supporting Effective Teaching in Tennessee: Listening and Gathering Feedback on Tennessee's Teacher Evaluation

Author: State Collaborative on Reforming Education

The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), an independent non-profit based in Tennessee, recently released the results of teacher and administrator feedback on TEAM and a few other teacher evaluation systems.

Portability of Teacher Effectiveness Across School Settings

Authors: Zeyu Xu, Umut Ozek, and Matthew Corritore

This report investigates the assumption that teacher productiveness is portable across school settings, a key concept underlying several major policy initiatives designed to improve student learning.

Turning Around Low-Performing Schools in Chicago: Summary Report

Authors: Marisa de la Torre, Elaine Allensworth, Sanja Jagesic, James Sebastian, Michael Salmonowicz, Coby Meyers, R. Dean Gerdeman

"The goals of the study were to make clear how school reform occurred in Chicago—showing the actual changes in the student population and teacher workforce at the schools—and to learn whether these efforts had a positive effect on student learning overall."

Off the Clock: What More Time Can (and Can't) Do for School Turnarounds

Author: Elena Silva

This report "takes a look at the facts—and the myths—about school calendars and schedules. Extended learning time is one of the key elements of the federal government's SIG program. More than 90 percent of the schools in the program have selected one of two options—'turnaround' and 'transformation'—that mandate more time."


REL QUICK LINKS

CONTACT US


Website:
www.RELAppalachia.org

Email:

[email protected]

Phone:
703-824-2340

This newsletter was prepared under a contract with the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, Contract ED-IES-12-C-0005, by Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia, administered by CNA. The content of the publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IES or ED, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. government.