From Multiple Choice to Multiple Choices

Are standardized tests an equitable way to measure the achievement of America\u27s children? A fresh, four-year study by the Educational Testing Service of the gender gap on standardized tests concludes that differences in performance between boys and girls are real, but not large, and cut both ways. ( ETS Disputes Charges of Gender Bias, May 14, 1997.) Still, critics of standardized testing, like the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, blast the ETS study as a smoke screen designed to divert attention from the ongoing problems with the exams they publish

Building a Lattice for School Leadership: Lessons From England

This policy brief examines the evolution of the educational leadership development system in England to see what ideas American leaders and policymakers might take from looking transnationally. The brief is based on a more in-depth examination of that leadership development system described in a CPRE research report entitled Building a Lattice for School Leadership: The Top-to-Bottom Rethinking of Leadership Development in England and What It Might Mean for American Education. The research report was based upon a year of research on school leadership in England that included extensive background research, site visits to schools and leadership programs, and over 20 interviews with government officials, teachers and school leaders, university researchers, union officials, and both forprofit and non-profit school leadership providers

The Linking Study: An Experiment to Strengthen Teachers\u27 Engagement With Data on Teaching and Learning

In this AERA 2013 paper, Dr. Jonathan Supovitz investigates what it means for teachers to fruitfully use data to enhance the teaching and learning process. Informed by research on the challenges teachers face to use data meaningfully, and clues from the rich literature on formative assessment, this paper reports on the design and effects of an intervention designed to help teachers connect data on their teaching with data on the learning of their students for the purpose of informing subsequent instruction which leads to better student outcomes. The hypothesis of this study, therefore, is that while examining data may be useful, the real value of data use is to examine the connection between data points – in this case the instructional choices that teachers make and the learning outcomes of students. Thus, ‘data use’ in this study means encouraging and facilitating teachers’ analytical experiences of linking data on teaching to data on the learning of their students

Building a Lattice for School Leadership: The Top-to-Bottom Rethinking of Leadership Development in England and What It Might Mean for American Education

This report examines the educational leadership development system in England over the last 15 years to identify ideas American leaders and policymakers might learn from looking cross-nationally. The report describes the rise of the National College for School Leadership in England, which spearheaded much of the early policy development and enactment and the subsequent governmental shift towards a more decentralized policy of fostering school networks. Supovitz envisions the potential assimilation of these two movements into an integrated lattice for school leadership. The lattice for school leadership in England is the careful integration of formal and social learning opportunities for leaders. It features a centrally developed, high-quality leadership development program combined with lateral social networks. These complementary elements of leadership development are carefully enmeshed in a system that provides clear responsibilities for multiple levels of leadership within schools, incentives for identifying and grooming leadership within schools, pathways for leadership progression, and certification for leader attainments. All of these elements are supported by an accountability structure that emphasizes the contribution of school leadership and teaching in school improvement

Mapping a Course for Improved Student Learning: How Innovative Schools Systematically Use Student Performance Data to Guide Improvement

To be useful to teachers and school leaders, test data must provide more than just a destination. Student performance results must also provide guidance that informs educators that they are moving in the right direction, while providing interactive and recursive feedback for mid-course adjustments. In order for student performance data to be useful to teachers and school leaders, and to make it worthwhile for them to make the extensive efforts necessary to learn to interpret and act upon what they learn, data feedback systems must rely on multiple sources of data collected and analyzed at regular intervals. This report is about building better roadmaps for teachers and school leaders in order to guide their instructional decision-making. The data required for more precise decision-making come from systematically exploiting a variety of student performance data at both the individual classroom and school levels. Rather than just relying on one individual test to provide guidance, innovative school leaders are building more comprehensive systems of assessments that provide better interim information from multiple perspectives. Through more sophisticated data systems, teachers and school leaders can foster a more inquiryoriented approach that involves ongoing and sustained investigations into the kinds of teaching that produce more powerful student learning. In this report, we show how innovative teachers and school leaders are creatively using their data to help guide their strategic decisions. Through their examples, we develop and describe a theory of what a system of school data use might look like

Building a Foundation for School Leadership: An Evaluation of the Annenberg Distributed Leadership Project, 2006-2010

Leading school change is a challenging endeavor. Successful leadership requires strategic and sustained effort, particularly in the shifting and uncertain environment of urban public schools. The concept of distributed leadership—in which multiple actors tackle the challenges of school leadership in concert—is a promising way to strengthen professional practice and thereby improve the educational experiences of all students. The Annenberg Distributed Leadership (DL) project was one of the first efforts in the nation to deliberately take on the challenge of designing and implementing a concerted effort to build distributed leadership capacity in a diverse set of urban schools to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The DL project featured the careful selection of leadership team members to identify and lead instructional improvement efforts; ample professional development to build cohesive teams and help members understand the motivational, psychological, and pedagogical aspects of advocating instructional change; resources to apply to the task; and ongoing school-based coaching to guide leadership team efforts. This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s mixed-method evaluation of the DL project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study, and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation

The relationship between teacher implementation of America\u27s Choice and student learning in Plainfield, New Jersey

The America\u27s Choice School Design is a K-12 comprehensive school reform model designed by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). America\u27s Choice focuses on raising academic achievement by providing a rigorous standards-based curriculum and safety net for all students. The goal of America’s Choice is to make sure that all but the most severely handicapped students reach an internationally benchmarked standard of achievement in English/language arts and mathematics by the time they graduate

The Impact of Formal Teacher Leadership Programs on Teachers’ Instructional Practices

Teacher leadership is a growing reform in the United States, with almost 300 active programs that are preparing, positioning, and/or rewarding teacher leaders (Berg et al., 2019). Despite this plethora of activity, there is relatively little empirical research on the influence of teacher leadership on teacher practice. This study adds to the research base on how teacher leaders influence instruction. The study focuses on the instructional influence of teacher leaders in formal teacher leadership programs in four districts in three American states. Although the programs had different emphases and structures, all four provided training, ongoing support, and formal school positions for teacher leaders, who were charged with working with teachers to support instructional improvement. Using survey data from approximately 1,050 teachers in 45 schools in the four districts and interview data from a subset of schools, we examined the relationship between the activities of teacher leaders and teacher reports of teacher leader influence and changes in instruction. The findings indicate that teachers who report being influenced by their teacher leader also report more frequently planning with their teacher leader, engaging in professional learning activities with their teacher leader, and participating in observations and feedback with their teacher leader. Additionally, higher levels of teacher leader influence are associated with teacher reports of change in instructional practice

Instructional Leadership in a Standards-Based Reform

The spotlight of educational leadership is on instructional leadership. As pressure for improving student performance in the current standards-based accountability environment swells and test results are increasingly scrutinized, school principals are being urged to focus their efforts on the core business of schooling--teaching and learning. But what does it mean to be an instructional leader? What do principals that are instructional leaders do differently than other principals? How do they spend their time? How do they shape the cultures of their schools? How knowledgeable are they of subject-matter content? How do they work with, and develop, other leaders in their schools? In this study we sought to find answers to these questions by exploring the collective wisdom of several effective instructional leaders. Instructional leadership, not just by the principal but by a wider cast of individuals in both formal and informal leadership roles, can play a central role in shifting the emphasis of school activity more directly onto instructional improvements that lead to enhanced student learning and performance. By contrast, the status quo in most schools is diffuse attention to instruction scattered amidst a variety of environmental, social, and organizational distracters that lead to fragmented and uneven instructional focus. Principals are typically engrossed in organizational care-taking and the responsibility for instructional decisions falls to individual teachers. When individual teachers independently determine the kind and type of instruction in their classrooms, three things tend to occur. First, the instructional culture of the school tends to splinter, as there is no overriding instructional guidance and no coherent glue to tie instruction to a larger whole. Second, the quality of instruction varies widely, as teachers bring different experiences and have different notions of what is good teaching. Third, the content that students receive, even in the same grade, differs from classroom to classroom, as each teacher prioritizes what students ought to know

Parallel Play in the Education Sandbox: The Common Core and the Politics of Transpartisan Coalitions

In Parallel Play in the Education Sandbox: The Common Core and the Politics of Transpartisan Coalitions,” Patrick McGuinn and Jonathan Supovitz examine the successes and limits of transpartisan opposition to Common Core. What are the lessons of the Common Core fight for education policy? Are there lessons applicable to other fragile areas of bipartisan cooperation? This report is the third in a series of New Models of Policy Change case studies published by New America