Public Impact News & Views

How has being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive? We profiled eight such leaders to find out, in a three-part series written by Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle, Juli Kim, Shonaka Ellison, and Ismael Hernandez-Cruz in partnership with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Identity and Charter School Leadership—Profiles of Leaders of Color:

1. Building an Effective Staff
2. Engaging Families
3. Building a Strong School Culture

1. Addressing holes and creating opportunities based on personal experience. Based on holes in their own academic experiences as a person of color or as a child from a low-income family, many of the school leaders in this series have taken nontraditional steps to address those same challenges in their own schools.
2. Emphasizing value over deficits. Many of the leaders in this series emphasized the value that students and their families offer rather than seeing their primary roles as compensating for or working around perceived deficits.
3. Providing an equitable educational experience to produce equitable student outcomes. The leaders of color included in this series all work hard to give students an educational experience like that of their more advantaged peers—an experience full of art, sports, travel, and extracurriculars—as well as opportunities to learn from their mistakes. In some cases, they have even built their schools around themes and curricula seldom available in low-income schools and districts.

“As a black student from a low-income background, my experiences outside of school were limited. Other students could afford the trips and activities that exposed them to the world beyond our small town, while I had to rely on books for exposure,” said Shonaka Ellison, a senior consultant at Public Impact. “It has been truly inspiring to speak with leaders of color who had a similar experience in school and now work tirelessly to ensure that their students have different, broader experiences, which will lead to their success in the future.” [Read more…]

This blog was first published on Education NC on November 19, 2019.

Digital learning has gotten a bad rap, in some cases reasonably so, especially for the lack of results with disadvantaged learners. Meanwhile, alarms are sounding about the rise of online screen time co-timed with surges in anxiety, depression, suicide and insomnia among teens and young adults, here and abroad. While providers entice students with more game-like digital learning — possibly an extra blow to students’ mental health — parents are paying consultants substantial sums to reverse screen addiction.

Yet investment continues in online learning and digital tools. (Note: Neither Public Impact nor the authors invest in or provide digital learning tools.) That’s partly because there’s potential profit to be made, but there’s also a potential benefit for students: Digital tools can help meet each student’s learning needs, especially important for those whose needs are poorly met in traditional, one-size-fits-all classrooms and those who need non-traditional hours for learning.

So, what’s the missing killer app that could help digital learning tools fulfill their promise at large scale — for educators, students and digital providers — without ravaging students’ mental health?

The answer is old-school: human connection. Not just any connection, but well-orchestrated teamwork among adults teaching the same students.

[Read more…]

In September, Public Impact convened its Opportunity Culture Fellows for collaboration and learning, featuring sessions on tools to help educators personalize instruction, the science of reading, strategies of multi-classroom leaders and principals for team leadership and leading schoolwide change, and effective advocacy within schools and districts. On the Opportunity Culture blog, writer Margaret High is sharing some of what we learned in a series of blog posts. Check out the recent posts:

Multi-classroom leader panel at the Opportunity Culture panel

• How can multi-classroom leaders (MCLs) build the cohesion of their teaching teams? A panel of five Opportunity Culture Fellows tackled this question—a hot topic among MCLs­—with suggestions that focused on the joy of team leadership as well as how to address challenges with team members. Read more in Building Team Cohesion: Opportunity Culture Fellows Share Strategies.
• Leading change and developing leaders: Opportunity Culture principals must know how to do this for student and teacher success, and Opportunity Culture Fellows are hungry for tips from their colleagues who do it well. At the Opportunity Culture Fellows Convening, a panel of principals highlighted strong hiring and communications as two keys among many to success. Read more in How Opportunity Culture Principals Lead Change and Develop Leaders.
• Opportunity Culture Fellows closed the 2019 convening by brainstorming solutions to this scenario in a session on the keys to effective advocacy—one of their most-requested topics. Effective advocacy means building support for an idea and getting others to act. That requires sharing information, exposing others to new information, or helping them see the known in a new way. Read more in the blog Advocating Effectively for Opportunity Culture: The Key Elements.
• In conjunction with the advocacy session, Public Impact has published a four-page guide on Opportunity Culture advocacy, which includes a common scenario in Opportunity Culture for discussion and brainstorming: Key Elements for Opportunity Culture Advocacy.

See the first two blogs here. Keep an eye on the blog for more posts, or subscribe to the RSS feed here!

In September, Public Impact convened its Opportunity Culture Fellows for a day of collaboration and learning which featured sessions on tools to help educators personalize instruction, the science of reading, multi-classroom leader & principal strategies for team leadership and leading schoolwide change, and effective advocacy within schools and districts. On the Opportunity Culture blog, writer Margaret High is sharing some of what we learned in a series of blog posts. Check out the first two:

• The Learner Variability Project, created by Digital Promise, an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit, was created to translate the growing body of research on learning for educators and parents. Digital Promise created a whole-child framework that feeds into its free tool, the Learner Variability Navigator, which guides users through the factors they need to address for each student and strategies to match. Read more in Strategies for Personalization: Learner Variability Tool Can Help .

Digital Promise’s Jessica Jackson (left) and Wendy Xiao (right) explain the Learner Variability Navigator at the Opportunity Culture Convening.

• Kelly Butler, CEO of the Mississippi-based Barksdale Reading Institute, condensed the science of reading into a one-hour overview presentation, issuing a clarion call for educators to follow the science of reading, focusing on phonics, brain development, the five components of reading, and the simple view of reading. Butler’s efforts to spread the word have helped move Mississippi’s reading growth to the top of state rankings. Read more in To Teach Reading Right, Understand the Science of Reading.

Kelly Butler, CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, speaks to the Opportunity Culture Fellows Convening.

Keep an eye on the blog for more posts, or subscribe to the RSS feed here!