Across the country, high schools have found that their ninth-grade students have the highest rates of truancy, discipline referrals, failures, and retentions. A school's worst data points are usually found among freshmen. For this reason, proactive schools seek strategies for transitioning freshmen into high school. An effective freshman…

Current education standards focus narrowly on reading, math, and science learning. As fundamentally important as those standards are, they do not incorporate the essential social, emotional, ethical, and civic dimensions of student learning. School climate does. A growing number of districts and state departments of education are in the process of…

In the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM), a school improvement strategy in place in New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; and Oakland, California, teacher teams improve their schools by studying and closing high-leverage learning gaps for small groups of struggling students as a strategy for systemic change. SAM's goal is for each school to…

There are dozens of books and hundreds of resources that address the issue of character development in students: how to raise them to be good people, how to teach them to be good citizens, how to help them to make good decisions. Little is written, however, about the character development of principals and school leaders, whose behavior is a model…