Seizing Opportunity at the Top: How the U.S. Can Reach Every Student With an Excellent Teacher

Explains how to provide excellent teachers for every child every year by better identifying excellent teachers, removing policy barriers so they can teach more students for more pay, and catalyzing schools' and districts' will to put them in charge

School Finance Toolkit: How to Create a Community Guide to Your School District's Budget

If your community-based organization would like to launch a school finance initiative in your community, you can use this toolkit as a starting point. The toolkit walks through the major steps organizations have gone through in their own initiatives, offering advice and examples of tools you can adapt for your own use. The toolkit explores the major challenges organizations have faced in this work, and how they have addressed those challenges. And the toolkit points you toward other resources that can help you find and analyze information about school finance. This toolkit is not itself a primer on school finance. Except in passing, it does not explain how school funding works in school districts. You will have to obtain this kind of background information from other resources (some listed in this toolkit) and as you go along.The toolkit contains five major sections:Get Started. This section helps you set a mission for your school finance initiative, organize your people to get the job done, and find the resources to get the job done.Engage the Public. This section discusses strategies for engaging the public up-front, finding out what citizens want to know about school finance -- and why.Crunch the Numbers. This section addresses the nitty-gritty work of creating a community guide to the school budget, offering helpful tips on finding, analyzing, and presenting information effectively.Put the Numbers to Work. This section talks about ways you can use the information you have gathered as a catalyst for community-wide discussions of school finance and its impact on school quality.Resources. This section contains a variety of tools used by community-based organizations in their school finance initiatives, everything from town meeting agendas to focus group questions to budget analysis spreadsheets. This section also contains references to many sources of data about school finance, many of them just a mouse-click or toll-free call away

Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers

Outlines how technology can help foster a robust capital market for public education innovation by improving content, linking technology with face-to-face networks, and streamlining transactions. Suggests steps for government, foundations, and developers

3X for All: Extending the Reach of Education's Best

Proposes ways to extend the reach of the best teachers, who produce three times the learning gains that the least effective ones do, including focusing on instruction, managing multiple classrooms, and using technology. Looks at implementation challenges

Opportunity at the Top: How America's Best Teachers Could Close the Gaps, Raise the Bar, and Keep Our Nation Great

Analyzes the effect the best teachers have on low-performing students' learning gains, the potential for closing achievement gaps by expanding their impact, and strategies to identify and retain effective teachers by building an opportunity culture

Florida Charter Schools: Hot and Humid with Passing Storms

This report examines the history of Florida's charter school initiative, results to date, and areas where the state can improve

How Should States Define Teacher Effectiveness?

Adapts slides from a presentation on defining a teacher's effectiveness based on student outcomes and teacher behaviors linked to outcomes, with rigorous and dynamic measurements that include deeper competencies, and extending the best teachers' reach

A Superior Vacation

In the extreme northeastern corner of Minnesota, a trifle over one hundred miles north of Duluth, lies the Superior National Forest, a million and a quarter acres of the Land of the Sky-Blue Waters. The area is a northland wilderness, still unmarred by civilization\u27s improvements

Rainbows and Sunsets vs. Forestry

You have perhaps read motorcycle advertisements. In each one there is usually a picture of a well dressed young man spinning lightly along the country roads. You imagine yourself in his place. You hear the lowing of the kine, the gurgling of the brooks, catch the fragrant odor of the new mown hay, or if it be in the spring time, of the blossoming trees, as you flit by the farm houses, from town to town, from county to county, from state to state, from-distance is limited only by the fervency of the ad-writer and your own imagination. If you are of a sporting turn of mind, you throw into the picture a race or two with limited trains, in which you tauntingly wave your hand in the engineer\u27s face, put on full speed and leave him to lumber along alone

Education Reform for the Digital Era

Will the digital-learning movement repeat the mistakes of the charter-school movement? How much more successful might today's charter universe look if yesterday's proponents had focused on the policies and practices needed to ensure its quality, freedom, and resources over the long term? What mistakes might have been avoided? Damaging scandals forestalled? Missed opportunities seized