For over a decade, Education Resource Strategies, Inc. (ERS) has helped leaders of urban school districts strategically reallocate their resources to improve student performance. This work identifies seven Core Transformational Strategies that support high-performing schools; in high-functioning districts, resources (people, time, and money) are…

The Florida Department of Education (FDOE) is transitioning from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test® 2.0 (FCAT 2.0) to align with new student academic content standards. This booklet has been prepared to help understand the reports for the FCAT 2.0. It includes explanations of the reports,…

This article describes how a school district's use of a transparent tool coalesced support for systemic improvement. The author was looking for a way to push improvement in his 4,000-student school system when he discovered the balanced scorecard, a strategic tool for performance management. The author details how the balanced scorecard helped him…

In April 2012, more than 100 educators and administrators from across the nation came together in Reston, Virginia, for a full day of meetings and discussions to launch the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center Affinity Network. The Affinity Network's mission is to facilitate students' successful transition from high school to college by: (1)…

Duval County Public Schools (DCPS) is poised to take action today that will lead to serving all students more effectively. Although the challenges are significant, including deep budget cuts, the district made the strategic choice to look thoroughly at how resources are currently allocated and now has a foundation for making decisions that will…

Funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Math Design Collaborative (MDC) offer a set of instructional and formative assessment tools in literacy and math, which were developed to help educators better prepare all students to meet the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and succeed beyond high…

Distinct purposes were identified for this phenomenological multiple-case study. The first purpose of the study was to determine in what ways the BbPRP influenced (a) leadership, (b) strategic planning, and (c) process management among the five selected schools within AISD. The second purpose of this study was to examine administrators'…

The Federal government has brought the issue of low-performing schools to the forefront of public conversation by committing $3.5 billion over three years to turn around these schools. As of March 2011, over 1200 schools across the country had been awarded School Improvement Grants (SIG). Given the magnitude of this short-term investment and the…

The leadership of any organization is responsible for setting and communicating a mission, an inspiring vision and a set of core values. The leadership is also responsible for establishing a management system to achieve the missions and vision while adhering to core values. Many organizations do an excellent job of creating the mission, vision and…

Teacher quality is the most crucial component in promoting student learning. For all the controversy about No Child Left Behind, one underlying emphasis of the federal law that is irrefutable is the importance placed on teacher quality. Therefore, a school organization committed to excellence must recruit and select outstanding teachers. The Obama…

In 2010, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) launched an initiative to transform all district schools into full service community schools. The community school design provides integrated supports to students and fosters a school climate conducive to academic, social, and emotional learning. Interventions span in-school and out-of-school time,…

This leadership framework, based on practices employed by some the nation's most successful principals, can be used to diagnose and address school needs. The framework is excerpted from "Breakthrough Principals" © 2016 by Jean Desravines, Jaime Aquino, Benjamin Fenton, and New Leaders, published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brand. The…

Recent state policies demand universities restructure principal preparation programs. Mandates, though unfunded, provide an opportunity for universities to engage representative stakeholders who benefit from context specific instruction. This article demonstrates how professors in one research university used collected programmatic information and…

As America's Great City Schools implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), they have a unique opportunity to integrate strategies for teaching, intervening, and supporting the nation's urban students in a way that will ensure they have the literacy, numeracy, behavioral, and engagement skills necessary to be successful in college and…

This article provides an extended, comprehensive example of how teachers, schools, districts, and external factors (e.g., parental pressure and policy mandates) shape curriculum research in the U.S. It retrospectively examines how three different middle school curriculum units were implemented and scaled-up in a large, diverse school system. The…