Santa Fe/ Superintendent's Plan to Boost Schools: New 'Support Zones'
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
October 16, 2012
Superintendent Joel Boyd on Tuesday laid out preliminary plans for reforming and restructuring the academically challenged Santa Fe Public Schools by focusing largely on giving schools autonomy with regard to programming and funding.
Boyd titled his presentation during Tuesday evening's school board meeting "Creating a System of World-Class Schools: Putting Every Child on a Path to College and Career Success" and described it as "a theory of action for system-wide reform with a snapshot of a few strategies."
Boyd was hired roughly 75 days ago with a mandate to overhaul a school district battling low graduation rates, poor scores on standardized tests and divisions over how to address these and other problems.
In addition to seeking a way to get parents and others in the community to take more responsibility for helping boost student performance, he said the district will redefine the role of its central office and its roughly 25 schools by categorizing them into three zones. These would reflect the type of support the district gives to each site.
- Schools in the Innovation Zone would receive full autonomy to do what they think is best for their students in terms of programming and how they use funds.
- Schools in the Acceleration Zone would earn increased but not full autonomy, as well as coaching and guidance to support school-based decisions, and on-site monitoring to ensure they are improving.
- Schools in the Transformation Zone would receive frequent monitoring, more professional-development opportunities for teachers, targeted intervention programs for students and collaborative planning when it comes to the school's budget.
The district compiled these zone designations based on data culled from various areas, including student achievement, relative achievement (how a school compares to similar schools within the state), relative growth of students within a school and parent engagement and feedback.
- Wood-Gormley and Piņon elementary schools and Amy Biehl Community School at Rancho Viejo all earned high points and thus are considered Innovation Zone schools, according to the district's score.
- Another 16 schools, including Acequia Madre Elementary School, Ramirez-Thomas Elementary School, Capshaw Middle School and Santa Fe High School, fall into the Acceleration Zone category.
- 9 other schools, including Capital High School, Aspen Community Magnet School and the district-chartered Tierra Encantada, are in the Transformation Zone.
Boyd's plan includes creation of performance compacts setting out specific goals for educators and administrators and annual evaluations based on those compacts.
In addition, his plan emphasizes "Seven Keys for College Readiness" to ensure students keep pace through middle and high school so they can move on to college. Among those keys:
- Scoring "advanced" in reading and math on the state's Standards Based Assessments,
- completing Algebra 1 with at least a B by the eighth grade and
- completing Algebra 2 with at least a C by the 11th grade, and
- earning satisfactory scores on Advanced Placement, ACT and SAT exams.
"There is no silver bullet. ... This work will be hard and steady work every day," Boyd said. Concerning details, Boyd said he will release more specific findings during an Oct. 29 study session and then offer "a more clearly formulated and articulated" plan by the time of his State of the Schools speech, slated for Nov. 26.
The five school board members mostly praised the report, with Barbara Gudwin noting that it is "a tremendous step in the right direction." But she and board members Linda Trujillo and Glenn Wikle asked Boyd and his team to take student leadership efforts and community involvement into account when measuring the district's schools.
One possible move within the plan would be to create a ninth-grade academy and move all of the district's 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders into another site. Boyd has made it clear that the district would have to gain community support and set this programming in place first before deciding locales for the two sites. But it seems the district would have little choice but to turn Capital High School into the ninth-grade academy and make the larger Santa Fe High campus home to grades 10-12. Boyd said this discussion is not about fusing two schools but about creating more opportunities for students.
Only board President Frank Montaņo spoke to this issue. "I think there should always be Demons and that there should always be Jaguars," he said, referring to the two schools' mascots. "It would be a huge mistake to try to deny either one of those schools of their identities."
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Santa Fe/ Superintendent Joel Boyd on Creating 'World-Class Schools'
By T.S. Last
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
Oct ober 17, 2012
Three-quarters of the way into his 100-day "Entry and Learning Plan," Santa Fe schools Superintendent Joel Boyd gave what he called a snapshot of the strategies being used to guide school reform to the school board Tuesday night.
- "We've been unveiling strategies as quickly as we felt ready for them to be unveiled," Boyd, who came on board as the schools' chief on Aug. 1, said prior to the meeting. "We're not presenting them until they are ready and have been thoroughly vetted."
- Reorganization of the central office, introduction of a parent academy and performance compacts used to evaluate employee performance are three strategies Boyd has already made public.
Tuesday's presentation was titled "Creating a System of World-Class Schools" and focused on a "theory of action" Boyd said is designed to take the school system to the next level.
- In essence, the theory is that if the district improves the quality of teaching and learning at every school, heightens expectations for teachers and students and increases family and community involvement, then classroom experiences will become more rigorous and relevant, and students will be better prepared for college or to join the workforce when they graduate.
Boyd used Standards-Based Assessment scores to illustrate the need for reform. Bar graphs show little improvement in reading and math scores over the past four years.
- "At our current rate, it'll take 156 years to get to the point where all our students are proficient," he said.
Boyd said proficiency should not be the standard for measuring student progress and success. Instead, college readiness - having skills necessary to succeed in college without remedial courses - becomes the new standard.
Seven keys for tracking the trajectory toward college readiness are defined under the plan,
- starting with keeping kindergarten through second-grade students at the "low-risk" level on the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) scale.
- SBA scores in reading and math and algebra track student progress through elementary and middle school, and
- college placement scores measure readiness prior to graduation.
As was discussed after the presentation, these keys are subject to modification to create a better model.
To get students on track for college, Boyd said a foundation for improving the quality of teaching and learning must be set at each school.
Boyd's plan calls for the district to redefine the role of the central office to maximize support at each school.
- Schools are placed in one of three zones - transformation, acceleration and innovation - to set them on course for improvement.
- "The goal is to have schools correctly identified as to which phase of improvement the school lies," Boyd said. "Aligning schools along these three zones creates a demand and allows us to make sure resources are available to them when they need them. In the long term, central office becomes a service provider."
Schools are assigned to the zones based on student achievement, relative growth and other factors. "Within each zone there are certain levels of autonomy, and these can change as we see them move up a level of achievement," Boyd said. "It's aligning services provided by central office to the needs of the school."
Boyd said increasing family and community engagement is a key part of school reform.
- Engaging parents as learners through the parent academy is part of a two-pronged approach.
- The other is expanding options for families through secondary school reform. A plan for that won't be ready to be rolled out until December.
In the meantime, a series of meetings for committees made up of internal and external educational partners and community feedback sessions will be held.
"In order for reform to work, it has to be community-based," he said.
Board member Glenn Wikle said he liked the concept but felt that criteria should be broadened to include oral and writing skills. Boyd agreed, saying including such data would make for a better model.
Board President Frank Montaņo commented on the terminology chosen to label the achievement zones. "I like the fact that Superintendent Boyd and his team have figured out a way to assess how schools are performing that isn't offensive. A to F is offensive," he said, referring to the Public Education Department's accountability grades.
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Farmington/ Lights On Afterschool Rally at Library
By Leigh Irvin
Farmington Daily Times
October 16, 2012
Celebrating programs that keep kids active and safe after school is the purpose of the 13th annual Lights on Afterschool rally, sponsored by the Afterschool Alliance.
Children, parents, business and community leaders will come together from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Thursday for a rally at the Farmington Public Library, the Bayless Power Library in the Farmington Boys & Girls Club, and the Blended Zine and Shiprock Branch Library.
The rally will celebrate the achievements of after-school students and draw attention to the need for more after-school programs, which serve children nationwide who are unsupervised each weekday afternoon. Tight budgets are endangering after-school programs throughout New Mexico and around the country, forcing many to cut back or even close their doors.
As with other Lights On Afterschool rallies across the nation, Farmington afterschool supporters will urge lawmakers not to cut funding for afterschool programs.
Thursday's gathering will be one of 7,500 such events across the nation emphasizing the importance of keeping the lights on and the doors open for afterschool programs. "We are all extremely proud of our afterschool students and the incredible work they're doing," Flo Trujillo, Afterschool Alliance's ambassador for New Mexico, said in a news release. "Afterschool programs do an outstanding job of keeping kids safe, inspiring them to learn, and helping working families."
- There are 2 afterschool programs funded by the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative, at Apache and Mesa Verde elementaries.
- Farmington Public Library also offers bilingual after-school programs during the week. "This includes an online database and live homework help, using your school issued-laptops and the libraries' Kindle Fire, Color Nook and iPad," Norma Chacon, of the Farmington Public Library, said in a news release.
"Lights On Afterschool celebrates the skills students learn at our afterschool programs. It is a powerful reminder that after-school programs keep children safe, inspire them to learn, and relieve working parents of worries about how their children spend their afternoons."
For more information on Thursday's rally, contact the Farmington Public Library Youth Services at 505-599-1261, or visit www.afterschoolalliance.org for information on the Lights On Afterschool program.
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Belen/ DAs: NM Lacks Law on School Threats
Prosecutor gets creative in charging Belen students
By Alex Goldsmith
KRQE-TV, Channel 13
October 16, 2012
When four Belen teens were arrested last week, accused of plotting and threatening to shoot classmates at Belen Middle School, 13th Judicial District Attorney Lemuel Martinez looked to see what he could charge the eighth graders with.
- "We looked at a lot of different charges, and we only found a petty misdemeanor which relates directly to what the children did," Martinez said.
- That charge was Interference with educational process.
Alejandro Ortega, Lawrence Chavez, Khaleb Lucero and Mateo Jaquez are also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a felony, which Martinez admits may be a bit of a stretch.
- "We'll see how far we can go prosecuting this, but this creative charging mechanism should be not be left to the district attorney," Martinez said. "The law should be clear about what we do in this case."
It's that lack of a specific law on the books that 11th Judicial District Attorney Rick Tedrow of Farmington ran into when he's looked at similar cases in his part of the state.
- "What we had come to the conclusion was there's no real charges that involve the threats that we see in schools nowadays," Tedrow said in a phone interview.
Both are now pushing for the state Legislature to pass a comprehensive school-violence law when it convenes in January. Tedrow's proposal would allow for any threats of school violence to be charged as a misdemeanor or a felony depending on the severity of the case.
"This is just our way of being proactive instead of retroactive when something actually does happen," Tedrow said.
On Tuesday District Court Judge Violet Otero released two of the four students charged from jail to await trial under GPS-monitored house arrest. They received the same treatment as their other co-defendants who were released at a hearing Monday.
Belen Consolidated School District Superintendent Ron Marquez told News 13 all four are suspended and the district is recommending the students be expelled. An independent hearing officer will make the final decision on that part of the case.
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Washington DC /ABQ Parenting Program Aims to Help Latinos Close Early-Learning Gaps
By Lesli A. Maxwell
Education Week [Edweek.org]
October 16, 2012
Recent studies are finding that immigrant Latino families provide some of the best starts for young children, even when those families face disadvantages because of poverty.
- They are more often than not two-parent households,
- more likely to have mothers who don't experience mental health issues, and
- tend to provide a strong foundation for social-emotional learning in their young children, which is a well-documented set of skills necessary for success in school.
But there are still significant gaps in readiness between Latino children and their white and Asian-American peers before they enter school, especially when it comes to literacy.
A 5-year-old program is taking aim at eliminating those gaps by focusing on parenting practices for children from birth to age 5.
Called "Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors," the program, while still relatively new, is showing improved outcomes for the parents around the country who have participated. A new research brief from a team at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that the program raises Latino parents' knowledge about early-literacy skills, social-emotional development, and health. http://www.familiesinschools.org/abriendo-puertas-opening-doors/
The Berkeley team drew its conclusions based on the results of survey questions that were answered by more than 600 parents who took part in 35 Abriendo Puertas programs across six different states.
- 86 percent of the surveyed parents are immigrants and most of them are from Mexico.
- 66 per cent reported that they were married.
- 28 percent said they had completed grade school,
- 23 percent said they attended some high school, and
- 27 percent said they had earned a high school diploma, received a GED, or had completed some college coursework.
- Most of them reported having two children.
Before taking part in the 10-session Abriendo Puertas program, participants answered survey questions about early learning and development, language and literacy, school preparation, health and wellness, parenting knowledge, and their own confidence in their skills for raising children. They answered the same questions again after completing the program. The researchers found that, across all categories, the parents had gained substantial knowledge and confidence in their skills as parents and as their children's first teachers after completing the training.
One question in the literacy area was how often parents take their children to the library.
- Prior to participating in Abriendo Puertas, 30 percent said they had never been to the library with their child.
- After the program, fewer than 2 percent of parents reported this. T
- here was also a 36 percentage-point uptick in the number of parents who reported taking their kids to the library at least once per week.
The program's effects "were impressive and important," said Margaret Bridges, the UC Berkeley, researcher who led the project.
Here in Albuquerque, the two-year-old Abriendo Puertas program has trained about 150 parents in the southwest quadrant of the city, said Adrian Pedroza, the executive director of the Partnership for Community Action, a nonprofit community organization that secured grant funding from the Kellogg Foundation to bring the program to Albuquerque. To date, the program has targeted the parents of children ages 3 to 5, who attend Even Start early-childhood and family-literacy programs housed in eight public elementary schools. http://www.abqpartnership.org/cea.htm.
One of the biggest misunderstandings of early literacy that the Albuquerque program has helped to reveal among the mostly immigrant, Latino families, Pedroza said, is that parents think they shouldn't read to their children in Spanish. They worry that reading in Spanish would somehow harm their children's chances for learning English, he said.
- "They will say that they shouldn't read to their child because they don't speak English," said Pedroza, who is an appointee to the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
- "This program does a lot to help counter those myths about literacy and language and for these parents to see their Spanish language as an asset for their children." http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/list/hispanic-initiative/index.html
Here, the first wave of parent training was conducted by facilitators who had been prepared by the developers of the Abriendo Puertas curriculum.
- Since then, however, a cadre of local parent educators who went through the program themselves has taken over most of the training, a model that Pedroza said would be more sustainable over the long run.
- Another upside to using local parents as trainers, he said, is that they learn to become community leaders and advocates for education and other issues.
Other New Mexico communities are also using Abriendo Puertas, including Las Cruces, south of Albuquerque, and Farmington, Pedroza said.
- The program, which was developed in Los Angeles, has so far served more than 22,000 families in 31 states and Puerto Rico, according to the research brief.
- The program has been adopted by the Los Angeles Unified School District and is used as a parent engagement model in Head Start centers.
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Washington DC/ Bandwidth Demands Rise as Schools Move to Common Core
School technology needs grow faster in preparation for common-core
By Ian Quillen
Education Week, Vol. 6, Issue 1 [Edweek.org]
Digital Directions
October 17, 2012
From the outside, experts, advocates, and government agencies appear to be placing more than enough attention on schools' growing demand for better Internet connectivity.
- As one example, promoting and facilitating projects to bring more broadband Web access to schools and libraries has been a major focus of the Federal Communications Commission during the more than three years Julius Genachowski has served as FCC chairman.
- Meanwhile, the Washington-based Software and Information Industry Association, or SIIA, in a survey released this past summer, reports that educators are continuing to express a high desire for more robust on-campus Internet connections.
- And the Glen Burnie, Md.-based State Educational Technology Directors Association, or SETDA, in recommendations it issued last spring for school connectivity speeds, signaled that schools' demand for connectivity was something that would increase exponentially rather than linearly.
But with the Common Core State Standards initiative pushing schools in 46 states and the District of Columbia to administer "next generation" assessments almost exclusively online-with an accompanying commitment to more digital resources-it's possible schools' demand for bandwidth could exceed even those projections.
Further, ensuring access to enough bandwidth-the common term for the measure of the rate of data consumption that is possible over a given network-isn't always as simple as increasing funding or raising priorities. And it's even more difficult when districts use shortsighted methods to calculate just how much bandwidth they need.
- "My pulse on what is going on in many districts is that necessary bandwidth ... is lacking, both between schools and out to the Internet," says Bailey Mitchell, the chief technology and information officer for the 38,000-student Forsyth County, Ga., school system. He also chairs the board of directors of the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN.
- "Most folks identify needs as the amount of equipment you have connected," Mitchell adds, but "it is more about the levels of [technology] adoption for your teachers, students, and staff."
Determining Bandwidth Needs
In its report issued in May, SETDA recommends that by the 2014-15 school year, schools have at least 100 megabits per second of connectivity to the external Internet for every 1,000 students and/or staff members, and 1 gigabit per second of connectivity for data transactions within a schoolwide or districtwide network.
- That level of connectivity is what is necessary to allow students and faculty to use contemporary Web technologies such as video streaming, webinars, online courses, and formative and summative online assessments, according to the report.
- That 2014-15 year is the same year the common standards and their new assessments are to be fully implemented.
- By the 2017-18 school year, those recommendations call for expanding to 1 gigabit per 1,000 students and/or staff members for an external connection, and 10 gigabits for internal network connections for the same number of people, in anticipation of future technologies not yet conceived.
Both sets of recommendations have taken the coming implementation of the common standards into consideration, says SETDA Deputy Executive Director Geoffrey H. Fletcher. He concedes that any such considerations would fall well short of a concrete estimate of the connectivity required specifically for assessments and other digital materials stemming from the common-core initiative. And he also suggests the bandwidth necessary to administer assessments may pale in comparison with other, more organic school connectivity needs, which themselves could grow because of the standards' emphasis on applied knowledge and critical-thinking skills.
- "I think the [bandwidth] load in many school districts may be greater during a normal day than it would be for the online assessments," Fletcher says, adding that on assessment days, schools may have to choose between using the internal network only for assessment or for other school functions as well.
- "What I am curious about is ... how, of the content itself that is typically used in the classroom," he says, "how much of that is going to be turned digital."
However, for some schools and districts-particularly rural ones-getting enough connectivity to execute assessments across an entire school will be a substantial challenge, according to Denise Atkinson-Shorey, an educational technology consultant in Colorado and the former president and chief information officer for the Educational Access Gateway Learning Environment Network, or EAGLE-Net Alliance, which leads network-infrastructure projects geared to educational and government services.
The reason, Atkinson-Shorey says, is that the basic architecture of the Internet is not all that dissimilar to that of a municipal water system:
- Think of a core network as the central water supply, the middle-mile connections as the pipes that take the water from that supply to neighborhoods, and the network gateway as the smaller pipes that take water into homes.
- If the capacity for data transmission is too low at any step along the way, the connection speed (like water pressure) suffers no matter how much a single user invests in making bandwidth available at the network gateway end, she says.
- And in the case of many rural schools, it's the middle-mile connections, or the cables that run from hubs on the national Internet backbone, that are inferior.
"They haven't built the pipes out to get it there, so even if they could find the dollars to buy additional bandwidth, it's not there, it doesn't exist," Atkinson-Shorey says of the plight of some rural schools.
That's not to say money for bandwidth projects won't also be hard to find. Constricted budgets mean that not only do schools face the task of increasing their connectivity with less money to spend, they may also encounter more competition in applying for public funding to help with such projects.
Competing for E-Rate Money
On the national level, that competition is increasingly seen in the volume of applications for funding from the E-rate, the roughly $2.3 billion annual federal program that helps subsidize schools' and libraries' Internet-related purchases, notes John Harrington, the chief executive officer of Funds for Learning, an E-rate consulting firm based in Edmond, Okla.
- Applicants for the two-tiered program have generally been able to expect requests for Priority 1 funding-for projects related directly to giving schools a connection to an outside network-to be fulfilled.
- But increasingly, only districts with the highest levels of poverty are able to qualify for whatever funding remains for Priority 2 aid, which can be devoted to projects to improve internal connectivity.
Harrington says those funding requests would increase even without the common core, as digital resources continue their transition into the educational mainstream, but predicts common-core adoption will heighten the competition.
- "There's no question in my mind that it's going to drive the demand for bandwidth, which will drive the demand for E-rate funding," Harrington says.
- "It will definitely show up in this next E-rate application cycle because that's the 2013-14 funding year, and at the end of that you're starting the 2014-15 funding year."
In October 2010, the FCC made some changes to the program that could be seen as measures to alleviate funding pressures, including:
- indexing the then-$2.25 billion annual program for inflation;
- allowing for the use of E-rate dollars for buying Internet connections via fiber-optic wire networks; and
- allowing for a half-dozen pilot mobile-device programs, in which devices can leave campus with the student, to draw from a pool of $10 million in E-rate funding.
Fiber connections, at least theoretically, could be cheaper than other broadband options, depending on availability, while mobile devices can be a more affordable way than laptop or desktop computers to provide 1-to-1 connectivity, freeing up more cash to be invested in infrastructure.
- "The increase in E-rate funding requests reflects that schools realize that now, more than ever, students need high-speed Internet connectivity to meet their educational needs," reads an FCC statement issued to Digital Directions.
- "Through recent reforms to allow E-rate recipients to select the most cost-effective broadband solutions, and our daily interactions with stakeholders, we are continually assessing the E-rate program to make sure we can meet the essential needs of schools and libraries while staying within a set budget."
Karen Billings, the vice president of the educational division for the SIIA, says research the trade association has published reinforces Harrington's assertion that demand for connectivity will continue to rise.
Survey results released by the SIIA in July show that K-12 educators, despite experiencing increasing access to broadband Internet, still want more connectivity. But Billings says it's anyone's guess the exact influence that implementation of the common core has on that equation.
"We don't know if the responders themselves were expecting that additional need because of common core, but we do know that the need was there and they see it," Billings says. "From the other comments [on the survey], they all realize that with 2014 and online assessments approaching, their bandwidth has to be significantly stronger than it has [been] in the past."
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Denver CO/ Bill and Melinda Gates Drop in to Keep Tabs on Colorado Education Investment
By Kevin Simpson
The Denver Post
October 17, 2012
Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation has poured $10 million into a Colorado program testing ways to combine new state standards and teacher evaluations, flew here this week on a semi-secret visit to assess how the work has progressed.
- On Monday, they visited Eagle County, one of 13 districts participating in the Integration Project, which seeks to identify best practices for implementing a recently legislated set of education reforms.
- Then the billionaire couple returned to Denver to meet with representatives from other districts and Colorado Department of Education before spending time in Denver Public Schools.
The Integration Project is a collaborative effort by the Colorado Legacy Foundation and the districts with support from the CDE. It serves as a learning laboratory to determine what works - and what doesn't - as Colorado simultaneously attempts to install new curriculum standards and assessments, plus a state-mandated evaluation system for teachers and principals.
The rare personal visit by the Gateses, whose funding often leads or closely follows key education trends, was greeted with enthusiasm.
- "I think it's significant for the state of Colorado," said Colorado Legacy Foundation CEO Helayne Jones. "The fact that they've chosen to come to Colorado is recognition of all those organizations and the local funding community that has been supporting reform work in the state."
Monday's visit to Eagle County created quite a local buzz, said superintendent Sandra Smyser.
- The district was prepared for "high-level visit" from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to look at the work on the Integration Project, but only a few knew that the Gateses themselves were coming.
"It's an important visit for them, because they don't make many visits to schools to see the vision and ideas on the ground where people are working hard to implement them," Smyser said. "They came to learn. They asked really perceptive questions and listened as we described the struggles and successes of implementing these changes."
The Gateses sat in on classes and actually joined students in some of the lessons. Smyser said that because adults often observe classes in the district, the kids had no idea who these guests were until a teacher introduced them.
"Some of them had actually done part of a lesson with Bill and didn't realize who he was," she said. "It would be like if you and I met Thomas Edison."
Back in Denver, the Gateses met with teachers and leaders from other districts involved in the Integration Project, as well as state education leaders, said Jill Hawley, the CDE's associate commissioner of achievement and strategy.
She added that the foundation's investment was rooted in local funding and "a strong policy environment" that put Colorado among the leaders in these types of reforms.
- "We were leading and they were investing to keep our momentum going," Hawley said. "They got to some of the most challenging and vexing questions the state faces, and really wanted to get deep into understanding how we can do just what the money is about - which is accelerating this work to get more quickly to gains for kids."
On Tuesday, the couple met with DPS officials and representatives from the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and then sat in on a math lesson at South High School.
- "We had a very in-depth discussion about the progress we've made working collaboratively with our teachers on providing much better clarity of what excellence is across multiple domains of teaching," said DPS superintendent Tom Boasberg. "And we talked about how we're carefully integrating the new, more rigorous learning standards under the nationwide common core."
Now one year into a three-year investment, the Colorado Legacy Foundation will use the Integration Project to offer resources and tools to all districts that need help making the transition to the new standards and evaluations.
The project also has held statewide gatherings where the integration districts, as well as state pilot districts for the new legislative mandates, have shared ideas.
And if the Gateses experience plants the seed for future funding, so much the better, said the CLF's Jones.
"That's certainly the hope," she said. "You can't run an education reform nonprofit without hoping people continue their investment."
