ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Why Community Engagement Matters in School Turnaround
Author: McAlister, Sara
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: School Turnaround,Community Involvement,School Community Relationship,Educational Policy,Educational Practices,Family School Relationship,Capacity Building,Educational Change,Change Strategies,Elementary Secondary Education,Educational Improvement,Models,Educational Planning

Research shows that an authentically engaged community improves schools--not just by participating in school events, but also by helping to shape reform. Family and community engagement is a proven strategy for strengthening schools. There is also ample evidence that schools serving large populations of students of color and students living in poverty have historically been the least successful at such engagement. These schools--often, the lowest-performing public schools--are precisely the ones that the Obama administration has targeted for turnaround over the past four years through Title I school improvement grants, the Race to the Top Competition, and state-by-state waivers of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act accountability provisions. Because of this, the administration has a special responsibility to ensure that its turnaround initiatives treat family and community engagement thoughtfully. In December 2012 the Department of Education released a new framework for family engagement drafted by Karen Mapp (2012), a prominent family engagement expert. This framework is solidly grounded in research and practice and emphasizes capacity building for districts, schools, and families. It calls for sustained investment in strengthening home-school partnerships and for schools and districts to treat engagement as a core strategy for school improvement. It emphasizes helping families take an active role in schools, building families&apos; and educators&apos; sense of efficacy through skill development, and creating multiple opportunities and invitations for engagement. Mapp grounds homes-school partnership in relational trust and shared decision-making. This new framework would provide an excellent basis for re-casting family and community engagement as a core priority in federal school turnaround policies.
Building Capacity for College Readiness Indicator Systems
Author: Mishook, Jacob
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: College Readiness,Capacity Building,Educational Indicators,Systems Development,Systems Approach,Transitional Programs,Educational Change,Change Strategies,Models,Management Information Systems,Performance Factors,Partnerships in Education

Over the last decade, a growing consensus has developed that for our nation&apos;s students to succeed in twenty-first-century economic and civic life, high school graduation is no longer sufficient. Labor-market analyses have shown that high-wage positions increasingly require postsecondary education and training, and students must now graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college and career. In response to these changes in the economy and labor force, policies are being adopted across the country, including the Common Core State Standards and accompanying assessments. These standards, to be implemented in 2014 in most states, codify the new skills required for students to be proficient in mathematics and English language arts. The codification of these broad college and career aspirations into policy opens up the possibility of a new era of equity, in which all students, including those who have historically been poorly served by the public education system, have the same access to and preparation for higher education that affluent families take for granted. At the same time, the new requirements present a colossal challenge to school systems. Not only must they get better at identifying which students are struggling, they must figure out how to use that information to support those students. Three years ago, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University (AISR) joined two other university-based partners--the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University (Gardner Center) and the University of Chicago Consortium for Chicago School Research (CCSR)--and five urban sites, with support from the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, to address these challenges. The goal of the College Readiness Indicator Systems (CRIS) initiative was to develop a model for systems that would not only generate data for districts on whether each student was on track for college readiness, but would also tie those data to supports and interventions that would help keep students on track. The contributions to this issue of &quot;Voices in Urban Education&quot; reflect the lessons of three years of work on the CRIS project. Collectively, they frame the current understanding of college readiness and show how college readiness indicator systems are being infused into the day-to-day work and culture of the CRIS sites.
Developing College Readiness within and across School Districts: The Federal Role
Author: Foley, Ellen
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: School Districts,Government Role,Program Development,College Readiness,Federal Government,Partnerships in Education,Transitional Programs,Shared Resources and Services,Change Strategies,Systems Approach,Community Involvement,College School Cooperation,Incentives,College Preparation,Educational Administration

Despite some cuts to the nation's oldest Federal College Access Programs, known as the TRIO programs (e.g., Upward Bound), new education policies have emphasized college and career readiness. In 2010, Congress approved the College Access Challenge Grant Program, which aims to increase the number of low-income students who are ready for college. Waivers of No Child Left Behind Act requirements have been granted to thirty-four states and the District of Columbia in exchange for adopting College and Career Ready standards, among other policies. Race to the Top applicants, which included forty-six states and more then 1,000 local education agencies, were also required to show that they had adopted those standards, and two consortia won Race to the Top grants to develop assessments, scheduled to premiere across the nation in 2014-2015, based on the Common Core State Standards. These are important developments. Unfortunately, however, they are not enough to ensure that all students graduate high school ready for college. In this article, the authors make suggestions about how to reframe current federal policy to promote a community-wide college readiness agenda, using lessons from U.S. school districts and their local communities. These recommendations focus on developing incentives and supports so that schools can learn from each other, build social ties across schools, and engage and sustain stakeholders in building a community-wide culture of college students. [Included with this article are three &quot;sidebars&quot;: (1) In the Field: The Providence Children and Youth Cabinet; (2) In the Field: State-Supported Data Sharing between K-12 and Postsecondary Institutions in Texas; and (3) Preparing Students for the Transition from School to the World in Savannah, Georgia (Alethea Frazier Raynor).]
Teachers Unions as Partners, Not Adversaries
Author: Catone, Keith
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Unions,Teacher Associations,Partnerships in Education,Models,Community Involvement,School Community Relationship,Community Organizations,Educational Policy,Educational Change,Parent Teacher Cooperation,Group Dynamics,Change Strategies,Educational Administration

Chicago has long been one of the national epicenters for public school reform. In many ways the reform efforts of the past decade in the Windy City have served as the blueprint for the current focus of federal education priorities. In particular, federal policy for school turnaround and transformation takes clear cues from the efforts that current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan oversaw in Chicago when he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2009. Shuttering low-performing schools (as measured by test scores), facilitating the restructuring of schools (often resulting in major shifts in personnel and student population), and promoting the growth of charter schools have all been strategies for Chicago reform and are now centerpieces of federal school turnaround guidelines. However, for such technical approaches to school turnaround to be successful, they must be accompanied by close consideration of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of school change. Without attending to these other dimensions, Chicago has experienced the alienation of its professional teacher corps and the disillusionment of many parents and grassroots community leaders with regard to public school reform, outcomes that undermine the social capital and trust that ensure broad local support for public school systems. Scores of underperforming and failing schools across the country are in severe need of turnaround and transformation. However, federal policies that introduce technical change and innovation without careful attention toward how to create change collaboratively with teachers, parents, and other community leaders miss crucial opportunities to engage those for whom the change matters most. The work of the Chicago Teachers Union, described in this article, provides a promising model of teacher and community engagement that the U.S. Department of Education can look to as they seek to create policies and guidelines that will support sustainable reform, particularly in urban areas.
Putting College and Career Readiness at the Forefront of District Priorities in Dallas
Author: Hall, Shane
Date: 2013-02-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: College Readiness,Career Readiness,School Districts,Longitudinal Studies,Educational Indicators,School Counseling

Dallas Independent School District's (ISD) efforts to develop a system of college readiness indicators began in 2008, when they received a Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation grant under the foundation's College-Ready Education initiative. With this grant, Dallas ISD's Performance Management and Analytics department developed a college readiness measurement model, as well as a dashboard and other data-driven measurement tools that would enable principals, teachers, and counselors to gauge the college readiness of their students. The college readiness measurement model, based on the work of the University of Chicago Consortium for Chicago School Research and David Conley's Education Policy Improvement Center, emphasized students' content knowledge, cognitive strategies, academic behaviors, and college context skills. The model also considered the college-going culture of schools and students' progress in college, as measured by data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). Dallas ISD has received NSC data and reports since 2006. Although they had extensive data on student content knowledge, as measured by grades and various assessments, the model identified a need for data on cognitive strategies, academic behaviors, and context skills and awareness. In 2010, the Dallas ISD began work on a longitudinal diagnostic study of college readiness and success. The study, completed in 2011, analyzed data on more than 75,000 high school graduates spanning the years 1998 through 2009. It was found that although more than 50 percent of the district's graduates enroll in college some time after high school, only 15 percent completed some kind of degree or certificate. They knew this was unacceptably low and that they had a lot of work to do to prepare their students for the demands of the twenty-first-century economy. In 2011, Dallas ISD's college readiness work continued when the district became one of the sites for the work of the College Readiness Indicator Systems (CRIS) project. The CRIS initiative found a new life in the district's Evaluation and Assessment department, where their assessment and NSC data resided. Cecilia Oakeley, assistant superintendent for evaluation and assessment, saw the potential of this work to impact the college and career readiness of students and has been a valuable source of support and leadership.
San Jose Unified School District, 2010-2013: Building a Culture of Evidence-Based Practice around College Readiness
Author: Kless, Lambrina
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: College Readiness,Educational Indicators,School Districts,Achievement Gap,Evidence,Educational Practices

In 2012-2013, leaders and staff of the San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD) focused on accomplishing the district's new mission: to aggressively pursue solutions to close the opportunity gap and ensure that all students leave SJUSD with twenty-first-century skills, prepared to participate in a global society. The district's participation in the College Readiness Indicator Systems (CRIS) initiative presented an opportunity to place the CRIS work within the context of the district's 2012-2017 strategic plan, Opportunity21. The district positioned the CRIS work as a way to establish, validate, and model a process for broad implementation of the district's Key Performance Measures (KPMs)--a set of connected data metrics that signal how well the district is accomplishing its goals. This positioning of CRIS has ensured a coherent K-12 effort by three CRIS schools--Lowell Elementary, Hoover Middle, and Lincoln High, which together create a college readiness pipeline throughout one feeder cluster of schools--and created a model for districtwide rollout of college and career readiness indicators. Three CRIS teams working on indicators at the school and district (setting and systems) levels successfully implemented what the authors refer to as &quot;data intervention cycles,&quot; which use data to identify struggling students, match the students with supports, and then evaluate the effectiveness of the supports. The district has used these cycles to begin building a culture of evidence-based practices districtwide.
Readiness for College: The Role of Noncognitive Factors and Context
Author: Nagaoka, Jenny
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: College Readiness,Student Behavior,Academic Persistence,Interpersonal Competence,Learning Strategies,Student Attitudes,Educational Attitudes,Expectation,High School Students,College Bound Students,Literature Reviews

Research has shown that in addition to academic knowledge, a variety of noncognitive skills are essential to students&apos; post-secondary success. This article summarizes a review by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) that brought together hundreds of studies of factors that have been tied to academic success into a coherent framework of noncognitive factors (Farrington et al. 2012). The review paid close attention to identifying which noncognitive factors matter for students&apos; long-term success, clarifying why and how these factors matter, and determining if these factors are malleable and responsive to context and how they are related to each other. The goal of the literature review was to develop a coherent and evidence-based framework for considering the role of noncognitive factors in increasing student attainment and to identify critical gaps in the knowledge base and in the link between research and practice. Parts of that review are excerpted here.
Democratic School Turnarounds: Pursuing Equity and Learning from Evidence
Author: Trujillo, Tina
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: School Turnaround,Educational Policy,Educational Improvement,Grants,Standardized Tests,Scores,Equal Education,School Effectiveness

the report &quot;Democratic School Turnarounds&quot; considers the democratic tensions inherent in the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) policy&apos;s market-based school reforms and critiques the research base that many of these reforms are based on. It concludes with a set of recommendations that re-center the purposes of public education for low-income students, students of color, and local communities and that are intended to guide federal, state, and local policymakers toward more equitable, democratic turnaround processes. Each recommendation stems from the provisional lessons that are emerging from current SIG-inspired turnarounds, from research on earlier efforts to improve school and district effectiveness, and from pockets of promising community-based practices that are developing at local and national levels. In this article, the authors present a selection of key points from the report, along with the complete recommendations. For the complete literature review and analysis, please see the full report at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ democratic-school-turnarounds.
Looking at the Right Data in the Right Way: Pittsburgh Public Schools
Author: Lavorini, Peter
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Scholarships,College Readiness,Educational Indicators,Public Schools,School Districts,Attendance Patterns,High School Graduates,Grade Point Average

The Pittsburgh Promise is a nonprofit organization that grants college scholarships to all Pittsburgh Public Schools students meeting the academic requirements. Thanks to the Pittsburgh Promise, the children of Pittsburgh have an opportunity that few other children in the country do: to attend college without the additional, often insurmountable obstacle of financial obligation. Because of this, Pittsburgh Public Schools has a unique imperative and is uniquely positioned to successfully implement the College Readiness Indicator System (CRIS). Graduates of one of nine high schools can earn up to $10,000 a year to attend college anywhere in the state of Pennsylvania, as long as they attain a 2.5 GPA and a 90 percent attendance rate during grades 9 through 12. Pittsburgh is using its college readiness indicator system to focus on the most useful information to monitor and the most effective way to analyze it to help students stay on track.
Learning from the Past, Looking toward the Future: The Next Four Years of Federal Education Policy
Author: Simmons, Warren
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Educational Policy,Federal Government,Educational Change,Change Strategies,Academic Standards,Strategic Planning,Organizational Objectives,Partnerships in Education,Equal Education,Excellence in Education,Elementary Secondary Education

January 2013, as this issue of &quot;Voices in Urban Education&quot; (&quot;VUE&quot;) goes to press, marks the beginning of a new presidential term--a good opportunity to gather ideas, reflect on what&apos;s working and what needs improvement, and rethink policies. The year 2013 also marks the Annenberg Institute for School Reform&apos;s (AISR&apos;s) twentieth anniversary of research and capacity building in support of equity and excellence in urban public education, working side by side with a broad range of partners across the nation. The Institute has learned a great deal in those two decades--both from their successes and from their disappointments. Informed by those experiences, AISR colleagues present the thirty-sixth issue of &quot;VUE&quot;--featuring, for the first time, AISR authors for all the articles--to share their recommendations for the next four years of federal education policy. A summary of those recommendations is presented herein.
Measuring Academic Tenacity: New Visions for Public Schools
Author: Carrano, Jared
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Public Schools,College Readiness,Skill Development,Developmental Studies Programs,Cognitive Ability,State Standards,Comprehensive Programs,High School Graduates,Program Descriptions,College Preparation,Organizational Objectives,Academic Persistence

Over the past three years, the College Readiness Indicator Systems (CRIS) project has afforded New Visions for Public Schools an opportunity to reflect upon their college readiness systems and practices. Through their involvement in the project, they have been able to explore various strategies for ensuring that their students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. Given the growing recognition in both the academic literature and policy circles of the importance of students' noncognitive skills development (known as &quot;academic tenacity&quot; by the CRIS project) for college and career readiness, New Visions has been interested in finding ways to measure--and to incorporate such measures--into their college-readiness metric. This article describes how the CRIS project enabled them to focus on this increasingly important work.
The Pittsburgh Promise: A Community's Commitment to Its Young People
Author: Ghubril, Saleem
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Youth Opportunities,Youth Programs,Community Programs,Community Organizations,Scholarship Funds,Scholarships,Public Schools,High School Graduates,Access to Education,College Bound Students,Organizational Effectiveness,Performance Factors,Barriers,Debt (Financial),Partnerships in Education,Paying for College,Interviews

The nonprofit community-based organization Pittsburgh Promise aims to help revitalize Pittsburgh and its public school system by offering college scholarships to any Pittsburgh Public School graduate who meets the academic requirements. Executive director Saleem Ghubril spoke with &quot;Voices in Urban Education&quot; guest editor Jacob Mishook about his organization's successes and challenges. Their conversation is presented here.
Cinekyd: Exploring the Origins of Youth Media Production
Author: Hobbs, Renee
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Youth Programs,Youth Opportunities,Mass Media,Film Study,Films,Film Production,Educational History,Phenomenology,Informal Education,Out of School Youth,Archives,Audiovisual Instruction,Educational Media,Student Developed Materials,Media Literacy,Video Technology,Trend Analysis

The youth media movement, which now has a place in countless venues, communities, and scholarly discourses, reflects an evolution of practices pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s as amateur filmmaking increasingly became a reality in American families and schools. In this paper, we examine the films of Robert J. Clark, Jr. as a representative early example of predominant modes of expression within the youth media community. We seek to identify the links between past and present in the continued popularization of youth media practices in schools, after-school learning environments, and camps as an issue of significant importance for archivists and historians, communities, and schools. This paper examines the historical development of a youth media practitioner who worked in both a school and an after-school learning environment for over 25 years, beginning in 1970 and continuing to 2005. We conducted a study of narrative feature-length films created by children ages 9-17 from a private archive of youth media work collected by the founder of Cinekyd, a for-profit youth media project developed in Philadelphia by Robert J. Clark, Jr. In this paper, we track the evolution of four films created between 1976-1982 as both historical film objects and as evidence of learning experiences. Though its amateurishness can often be strange, even off-putting, to wider audiences (one reason why much youth media is rarely showcased and often discarded upon completion), youth media and documentation of its creation also offer insights on the relationship between children and their adult mentors and between youth media authors and their presumed and real audiences.