Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim offer ideas and examples for how state chiefs can best use their powers to effectively lead the improvement of schools and districts.
State legislatures, governors, advocacy groups, and citizens are calling on state education agencies (SEAs) to do more to drive changes in K-12 education. In order to meet these new demands, states will need to restructure work along several fronts, including brokering support to struggling schools and districts, raising standards and expectations, addressing weaknesses in the teacher and principal labor market, and strengthening connections between early childhood education, K-12, higher education, and careers. They will need to act on these issues at a time of constrained resources. Our work explores how SEAs can meet the increasing demands they face.
We ask:
Envisioning the SEA of the FutureCRPE contributes an annual volume to the Building State Capacity and Productivity Center, a U.S. Department of Education-funded center that provides technical assistance to states. The SEA of the Future examines how SEAs are adapting to the growing demands for productivity in the face of tight fiscal realities.
State Regulatory Frameworks for Portfolio Cities State legal frameworks deeply influence how well a city can pursue the portfolio strategy. With the right leadership, cities can work to transform local public education, but they can be more successful when their state provides a policy environment that supports transformation. What changes in state law are needed to allow full implementation of the portfolio strategy? To answer this question, CRPE has mapped state barriers as well as proposed solutions relating to each element of the portfolio strategy, showing what a state can do to allow a city to advance its school system. CRPE has translated this work into model legislation, which provides not only a robust pathway for cities wishing to pursue the portfolio strategy, but also incorporates complementary education solutions, including a new conceptualization of local school boards, independent administration of education facilities, and remedies to district financial crises.
Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim offer ideas and examples for how state chiefs can best use their powers to effectively lead the improvement of schools and districts.
Polarization was the theme of 2016, and we’d be kidding ourselves to think that will be much different in 2017. Still, there has rarely been more need for new ideas that people can begin to...
In the ongoing debate about federal and state roles in K–12 public education, states got a leg up with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). It renounces the strong regulatory role that...
The Every Student Succeeds Act abandons the prescriptive approach to school improvement embraced by both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Obama Administration’s flexibility waivers. Instead, states are empowered to craft their own...
This paper provides the first comprehensive review of the research to date on state interventions, assessing the advantages and limits of five common turnaround approaches and outlining key ingredients for success.
The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives heavy deference to “local control.” School districts, charter schools, and communities are meant to be in the driver’s seat. And they are. States don’t improve student...
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...
The Common Core State Standards Initiative was designed to solve a problem that has plagued past standard-setting efforts. Many states responded to earlier efforts by watering down their standards for learning and lowering expectations for...
Betheny Gross and Paul Hill discuss the challenges and opportunities for state-level experimentation created by the Every Student Succeeds Act, in the Harvard Law and Policy Review.
CRPE research analyst Ashley Jochim and Drew University associate professor Patrick McGuinn explore why states are abandoning the assessments aligned with Common Core State Standards.
