School Improvement

This brief from Achieve identifies the key areas that state policymakers should consider in order to implement the new Common Core State Standards with fidelity. The brief provides suggestions for aligning these new standards with their existing standards and course requirements, as well as aligning assessments for collecting data and measuring achievement. The brief lists steps each state can take to ensure they are implementing the standards effectively.

This report provides a profile of 38 schools and details how these schools have implemented strategies to promote and advance college readiness. The report outlines each school, characteristics that make the school unique, and lessons learned from undertaking particular strategies. The report is organized into six sections: 1) alternative schools, 2) charter schools, 3) comprehensive schools, 4) early college high schools, 5) magnet schools, and 6) private schools. In several cases, schools may have utilized more than one strategy to achieve their goal.

This policy brief discusses the growing second-language learner population in schools. Through case studies of schools in Austin and the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, it provides state and federal policymakers recommendations for policy changes that can help schools increase student achievement among this population.

This study looks at reforms successfully sustained in four states – Texas, Indiana, Massachusetts, & South Carolina – to develop strategies and processes that can be implemented by others to achieve similar sustainability in their efforts of college- and career ready education reform. It discusses ten strategies used within these four states and summarizes the lessons learned from each.

This paper from the Center for Public Education is aimed at defining the educational skills needed in the 21st century. The author first outlines how the world is changing and the impacts on work and life. This includes automation of formerly human-performed tasks, globalization of the economy, and restructuring of traditional organizational hierarchies, along with a rapidly changing and more diverse demographic population who have more individual responsibility over their lives.

This report is a review of an adolescent literacy initiative established by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as part of its broader efforts to increase student achievement, specifically among historically under-served populations. The author explains the process undertaken in developing the Advancing Literacy Initiative over time and how the Carnegie Corporation parlayed that work into the effort that allowed adolescent literacy to define the education reform movement.

This report, sponsored by Digital Learning Now, identifies 72 measures that state policy makers should incorporate into their state policy in order to facilitate high quality digital learning for all students. The authors stress the importance of providing all students access to digital forms of learning, including virtual and blended learning, using digital learning to provide personalized learning trajectories, and providing quality content, instruction and choices through digital learning.

This report from Jobs for the Future highlights successful practices from North Carolina’s early college high schools. The report examines the effects these practices have had on students successfully completing the schools’ requirements. Successful practices include collaborative group work, literacy groups, and classroom conversations, among others.