An Outdated District Lens: Why State of Our Cities’ Focus Is Too Narrow
The Bush Institute recently released State of Our Cities, a compelling new data tool for viewing public school conditions and outcomes for over 100 cities. The project’s scope is impressive, but in some cases it misses the mark by equating a single school district with an entire city’s public education system. Our 2015 report, Measuring […]
Wells Fargo and the Atlanta Schools Testing Scandal
To people in education, the Wells Fargo scandal sounds eerily familiar. Top executives tried to increase performance by setting ambitious goals for opening new accounts, and attaching big rewards and penalties. Managers believed internal reports showing that the performance incentives worked. The incentives did work to some extent, in that the number of bona fide […]
Why Schools Shouldn’t Go It Alone on Personalized Learning
This is the fourth in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. Principals and teachers trying to personalize their students’ learning are charged with radically reimagining the classroom. It’s a tall order that requires educators to take risks, move outside their comfort zones, and essentially overhaul much of their jobs. What we’re seeing […]
Personalized Learning Can’t Ignore School Leaders
This is the third in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. Over the course of this project we’ve heard a lot from schools about what personalized learning (PL) means for teachers and classrooms, but less about what it means for principals—and that is worrisome. Most principals we’ve met in PL schools are […]
Low-Hanging Fruit: Small Ways Schools Can Make Big Differences as the School Year Begins
After I sent my kids back to school last week and watched the steady stream of adorable “first day” Facebook posts, I began thinking about all of the little things that schools do, or don’t do, that make a huge difference for students and parents during the first weeks of school. I started compiling a list of […]
Technology’s Unmet Progressive Promise
This is the second in our series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning. Twenty-five years ago, I was a young history teacher soaking up progressive teaching methods that aimed to foster deep, personalized learning for my students. My classroom was decidedly low-tech, but I can see how today’s technological advances might have made […]
Beware the Iconography Trap of Personalized Learning: Rigor Matters
This is the first in our series of “Notes From The Field” on personalized learning. My colleague and I recently visited a middle school science classroom. Students, outfitted with safety glasses, were organized into groups of three to four. The room was lively but not disorderly as each group worked on its own experiment. As we walked […]
Notes From the Field: Personalized Learning
In 2015, CRPE kicked off a multi-year, multi-method study of district and regional systemic efforts to support schools implementing personalized learning. Personalized learning (PL) is designed to tailor instruction to individual students’ strengths, needs, and personal interests—often integrating technology—in order to boost student outcomes. Over the next two years, we’ll look across a diverse range […]
Why Collaboration Can Be Harder Than Herding Cats
Researchers at CRPE use “Herding Cats” as a metaphor to describe the complications of district-charter school collaboration. I think they describe the challenges well, but they are also being polite. Really bad charter schools and the chance of changes in district attitudes toward them can make collaborating even harder than cat herding. As CRPE explains, collaboration […]
Taking a Lesson from The Boys in the Boat and Aiming for “Swing”
To be of championship caliber, a crew must have total confidence in each other, able to drive with abandon, confident that no man will get the full weight of the pull…. When you get the full rhythm in an eight, it’s pure pleasure to be in it. It’s not hard work when the rhythm comes—that […]