IN THIS ISSUE | Social capital in schools | Building leadership capacity | Test data and school improvement | New book on research use in schools | Fewer new teachers leaving the profession & more on teacher retention | The Common Core and higher ed | Minority teachers
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Broadening the Educational Capability Conversation: Leveraging the Social Dimension
In his recent guest blog post, Jim Spillane, contrasts individual human capital to social capital, emphasizing the importance of the relationships within an organization or system. He writes, "These social relations can be a source of and a channel for crucial resources such as trust, information, expertise, materials, security, obligation, incentives." Read the full post.
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Changing principals' leadership through feedback and coaching
This article from the Journal of Educational Administration presents findings from a randomized experiment designed to investigate the impact of feedback and coaching intervention on urban principals' leadership behavior and perspectives. Authors Peter Goff (University of Wisconsin-Madison), J. Edward Guthrie, Ellen Goldring, and Leonard Bickman (Vanderbilt) developed and implemented an approach to principal development that combined both feedback to principals from their teachers, along with coaching sessions specifically tailored to develop learning-centered leadership skills. The researchers found that feedback alone is unlikely to induce behavioral change and that coaching and other supports are necessary to help principals make sense of feedback data.
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Leading the Use of Research & Evidence in Schools
In a new book designed for busy teachers and school leaders, editor Chris Brown (University College London) presents a collection of diverse views on topic of schools becoming 'research-engaged'. The contributors include CPRE co-director Jonathan Supovitz and senior researcher Alan J. Daly with the primary aim of supporting schools as they grapple with the challenges of using evidence effectively. The book includes a guide for school leaders to take stock of the progress they have made in embedding successful research-engagement in their schools.
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CPRE's NCLB Study in Educational Policy
Although much has been written about the potential benefits of effective data use in schools, considerably less attention has been paid to how schools make sense of the data generated from performance-based accountability measures. State Test Data and School Improvement Efforts by Jessica K. Beaver and Elliot H. Weinbaum explores schools' usage of state test data, the intensity of data use, and the perceived utility of state test data. Thier findings reveal a key disconnect in the assumptions of performance-based accountability systems, wherein schools may faithfully use state data to inform improvement efforts while fundamentally questioning the validity of the data itself.
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New teachers are far less likely to leave the profession than previously thought, according to federal data released today. Richard Ingersoll served on an advisory panel for the longitudinal study of a representative sample of teachers who began their careers in the 2007-08 school year.
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Education Week | Why Colleges Should Care About the Common Core
Authors Harold G. Levine and Mike Kirst contend that higher education has only recently begun to appreciate the breadth of the potential impacts of the common core on their own practices, from admissions to instruction to student outcomes. And Levine and Kirst doubt that colleges and universities are ready to provide equally enriching educational experiences for students on the other side of the common core bridge.
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Although thousands of teachers enter the profession each year, nearly half of those teachers will transfer to a new school or leave the profession altogether within the next five years. Richard Ingersoll says this 'revolving door of teacher turnover' costs districts billions of dollars annually.
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New York Times | Where Are the Teachers of Color?
As minority students become a majority in public schools, teachers remain predominately white. Richard Ingersoll says the problem is in retaining, not recruiting, nonwhite teachers. He cites "student discipline problems and lack of resources and lower salaries, with often more top-down and scripted curricula," in addition to lack of autonomy as reasons teachers leave teaching early in their careers.
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