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Done Well, School Restarts Make a Difference for Students

written by Jon Rybka on May 17, 2016

This column was first published on May 17, 2016, on msdf.org, home of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

This is part of a blog series about one way we can help our nation’s lowest performing schools. In this series, we will introduce the concept of restart and will highlight: Who’s doing it, how it works and, ultimately, does it work. You can find the entire series here.

Over the past year, we’ve shared our experiences with school restart. As we discussed in our restart blog series, we describe school restart as matching high-quality operators with the highest needs schools in cities and districts across the country to restart them for better results. Our series served to answer the below question first asked by Joe Siedlecki in his blog Restarted schools: A necessary victory for kids:

“While every child deserves the chance to attend a quality school, far too many kids remain in failing schools.  This begs the question:  Who will take on the challenge of restarting these schools?  Will a set of high performing education and charter management organizations prove what is possible?  We hope so.  Because we need these entrepreneurial leaders to help break down long-standing barriers and push for necessary change in schools across the country.”

We’ve invested in school restart as early as 2005 and will continue to do so because it’s showing promise as a viable option in creating quality schools for students. We have seen that, under the right conditions, restart can work.

[Read more…]

Georgia Schools Join Opportunity Culture Movement

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 13, 2016

Georgia’s Fulton County Schools district has joined the national Opportunity Culture initiative to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within recurring budgets. In 2015–16, Benjamin E. Banneker High School and Woodland Middle School, on the south side of Atlanta, are the district’s first to design Opportunity Culture plans for 2016–17 implementation. Both schools are part of Fulton County’s achievement zone, created in 2015 to focus on the traditionally struggling high school and its feeder schools. The zone aims to rapidly improve academic outcomes for its students.

[Read more…]

Measuring School Turnaround Success: Report Explores Options

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 5, 2016

Turning a failing school around takes hard work—and can be even harder to sustain. And right now, most states don’t even have a clear, robust definition of turnaround success.

So Public Impact collaborated with the Center on School Turnaround on Measuring School Turnaround Success to explore an approach that states, districts, and schools can adapt to fit their own contexts. The authors detail the analyses conducted to test a critical part of this approach—measuring academic gains—and recommend expanding the measures to include leading indicators and targets based on school priorities for “early wins.”

[Read more…]

Hiring Turnaround Leaders Under ESSA–New Training

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on February 18, 2016

What makes school turnaround leaders special? State and district leaders can understand how to identify, select, and retain great leaders using the research-based competencies specific to successful turnaround leaders, with a new, free three-part professional learning module.

Developed through a partnership between the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders, the Center on School Turnaround, Public Impact, and the University of Virginia Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education, these tools build on the strong cross-sector research base on competencies in the workplace and the school-turnaround-specific work of Public Impact, the University of Virginia, and others.

Under the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states must still identify their lowest-performing schools, but how to turn them around will largely be left up to state and district leaders. Selecting the right leaders is critical to turnaround success, making training such as this module ever more important.

[Read more…]

Creating a Statewide Turnaround District: Lessons from Tennessee

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on October 14, 2015

When Louisiana and Tennessee wanted to focus on their lowest-performing schools, they created statewide turnaround districts, which pull individual schools under state control. As detailed in The Achievement School District: Lessons from Tennessee, written by Public Impact for New Schools for New Orleans, Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD), though modeled on Louisiana’s Recovery School District, has forged its own path and offers useful insights for other states.

After Hurricane Katrina, most New Orleans schools entered the Recovery School District en masse. But the ASD has taken a more staged approach in Memphis, which has the state’s highest concentration of low-performing schools. And while New Orleans uses an all-choice, charter school enrollment system, the ASD strategy preserves the traditional public school model of community-based, neighborhood schools.

[Read more…]

Charter School Lessons in New Orleans, Nashville

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on September 1, 2015

In two reports Public Impact has worked on, we look at charter schools’ effects, from a close-up of one school in Nashville to an entire district in New Orleans. We consider the 10 years of charters since Hurricane Katrina in Ten Years in New Orleans: Public School Resurgence and the Path Ahead, and the gradual conversion option in Expanding District Capacity to Turn Around Failing Schools: An Evaluation of the Cameron Middle School Charter Conversion.

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture Principals Speak: “People Want to Be a Part of This”

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on December 3, 2014

Now, it’s the principals’ turn: We’ve shared videos of multi-classroom leaders and team teachers telling why they love their jobs in the Metro Nashville schools that have created an Opportunity Culture. Hear why the principals at Bailey STEM Magnet Middle School and Buena Vista Elementary call an Opportunity Culture “sustainable,” “innovative,” and the “it factor” in changing the game for students and teachers. These principals’ schools use multi-classroom leadership, setting up the feedback loops from team teaching, collaboration, and teacher-leadership that they and their teachers revel in.

“Absolutely the most powerful benefit is student achievement”

“You make sure that every single child is in a top-quality classroom”

“Teachers are applying at newfound rates to be a part of this work”

[Read more…]

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New from Public Impact

Employment Opportunities—Opportunity Culture Consultant
Public Impact is seeking candidates for Opportunity Culture consultant positions, with a Summer 2021 start date. The deadline for applications is January 17, 2020!

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