Tag: Performance Management

With district schools around the country facing closure, one has to wonder: Were the school leaders in charge ever given the freedom to lead their schools to success? Or are the schools and their principals simply scapegoats for poorly designed strategies pushed down from the district central office?

As expected, the new report on quality in the charter school sector from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) hit the education reform space with a splash. But most commenters missed one key finding: Schools that contract with independent school support organizations perform better than CMOs, independent charter schools and traditional public schools.

When you look to the future, the potential to put education data to use is staggering. Remember the early days of wireless, when mobile phones were still a rarity? Now we’ve crossed the chasm and gone mobile in ways that, not so long ago, seemed utterly fantastic.

ANet began work in seven Boston charter schools in 2005. Five years from now, the company’s goal is to embed data-driven instruction into at least 500 schools nationwide, and to inspire an additional 1000 schools to adopt similar practices.

We don’t want Arkansas teachers to have to dig for information or labor over putting the pieces together; we want it presented to them in a way that’s immediately useful in the classroom setting. The Ed-Fi solution provides us the opportunity to do that – and to accomplish our goals quickly and efficiently, while minimizing cost by utilizing our state’s existing data systems and information technology architecture.

Over the next few weeks, my colleague Joe Siedlecki and I will examine what we view as the Top 10 Education Data Myths. One note as we kick this series off: We hope you'll weigh in on these and other myths worth challenging. Stay tuned - it promises to be a lively discussion!

In many ways, we’re in the pioneering stages of information-based instructional systems. As we scan the big data horizon, we might sometimes feel like the early aviators who first bravely took to the skies.

Delaware's Education Insight dashboard was developed in one year. Today, the dashboard is in use by 10 schools in four districts. Statewide deployment is scheduled for the start of the school year this fall.

Those of us in the education reform movement obsess about outcomes. But we’re missing something even more critical: Culture as an input. You can’t improve instruction and performance (period) if you don’t have control of the classroom culture.

Since 2009, the DC Public Charter School Board has closed 14 low performers. The board is now moving on to the next frontier: Coupling closure with the creation of new, better schools, streamlining the process for high performing schools to replicate and expand, and ensuring those schools grow into the neighborhoods most in need.