Teachers Don’t Need to Go It Alone on Personalized Learning
This is the eighth installment in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. When we first visited schools in spring 2016 for this project, teachers seemed to be taking on an unsustainably heavy lift as they transitioned to personalizing student learning (PL). Teachers were often rewriting units and lessons from scratch, with […]
District and Charter Leaders Talk Collaboration…In a Fishbowl
It’s common knowledge that school districts and charter schools rarely collaborate. At best, they are like oil and water and at worst, like cats and dogs. This is too bad: districts and charter schools share a deep commitment to educating children well, and they work in the same neighborhoods and serve the same families. Last […]
Time to Help Teachers Generate and Use Their Own Evidence on Digital Tools
This is the seventh installment in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. “There are so many digital resources out there, I am lost as to which ones are good.I usually try things that some of the more technology-knowledgeable people I teach with [use].”From “Teachers Know Best,” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, […]
Are We Personalizing Learning for the Students Who Need It Most?
This is the sixth installment in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. The theory behind personalized learning (PL)—crafting an individualized education experience for each student—holds tremendous potential for better serving all students, especially students who don’t fit the norm. But too often teachers in PL classrooms are simply substituting one-size-fits-all direct […]
Starting With the “Why” in Personalized Learning
This is the fifth installment in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. Last spring, on our first visit to 35 schools committed to personalized learning, teachers often told us they weren’t sure what they were supposed to be doing to personalize learning. Revisiting the same schools this fall, we realized a more fundamental […]
Dear States: Don’t forget about us. Love, the 95% of your schools not slated for turnaround.
As states unfurl their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans, we’ve been hearing a common dialog from state education leaders—promising on the one hand, troubling on the other. PromisingState leaders are taking seriously the mandate to retool their statewide accountability systems, especially with regard to addressing the bottom 5 percent of schools. States are figuring […]
Charters Must Avoid Recreating the Failed School District Financial Model
Charter schools start out with big advantages, but there’s no guarantee they’ll keep them. It depends on whether they avoid the same financial traps that school districts have fallen into. New charter schools control hiring and spending and can adapt to changes in students’ needs and improvements in instructional methods. In comparison, districts are frozen […]
What’s Next for Newark?
After more than two decades of state supervision, Newark’s public schools are slated to return to local control. When the state hands the keys back to the city, local leaders will inherit a district that’s in a fundamentally different position than it was in 1995, the year the state took over. Back in 1995, Newark […]
Tapping the Political Power of State Chiefs
Many have observed that the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act provides states a prime opportunity to support improvement in K-12 education. But can state chiefs, historically weak and with few formal powers, deliver? In a new paper published today, we argue that they can. While chiefs employ few people and control little money, their […]
How State Education Philosophy Informs Local District-Charter Cooperation Efforts
States diverge considerably in their philosophy about the relationship between school districts and charter schools, and the difference seems to matter to local collaboration efforts. Two states—Arizona and Massachusetts—exemplify how state education authority philosophies knowingly or unknowingly influence local action. Arizona’s charter law embraces market-based competition and eschews cooperation, which is a prescription that makes […]
