Scholarly research and common sense increasingly converge regarding the benefits to students of having access to teachers with solid training, subject-matter expertise, real-world preparation, and classroom experience. Teachers also need strong early support and ongoing professional learning.
Yet much of our policy focus remains on weeding out bad educators, rather than on developing, supporting and retaining good ones, and on using narrow and dubious metrics to distinguish those two groups. Further, evidence increasingly emphasizes the crucial role of strong leadership within schools.
In “Fiscal Crisis” or Physical Crisis?, Elizabeth Hoyson recounts the stark mismatch between the skills she acquired during her six-week urban teaching fellow boot camp and the deep-seated academic and emotional needs of the …
Teachers and students alike do better when school systems are able to ensure that all children’s social, emotional, physical, and mental health needs are met. BBA case studies illustrate a range of benefits as …
The Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) goes beyond teacher voice and engagement to cultivate teachers’ active leadership in order to develop innovative ways to improve teaching and learning. In a recent blog post, Barnett Berry …
The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) produced Developing Effective Communities of Practice Using The National Board Certification Process.
Since 1987, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has sought to advance the quality of teaching and learning by maintaining high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to …
As part of its work to advance system-level improvement, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching produced Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, a 2015 report that …
Scholarly research and common sense increasingly converge regarding the benefits to students of having access to teachers with solid training, subject-matter expertise, real-world preparation, strong early support, and classroom experience. Yet much of our policy focus remains on weeding out bad educators, rather than on developing, supporting and retaining good ones, and on using narrow and dubious metrics to distinguish those two groups. Further, evidence increasingly emphasizes the crucial role of strong leadership within schools.
Policy solution: A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education prioritizes developing a strong, experienced corps of professional educators while supporting the dismissal of the small minority of weak ones. It also promotes systems that ensure that it is truly bad teachers, not good teachers struggling under difficult conditions, who are weeded out. And it works to build an education system that makes teaching and leading in high-needs schools attractive and meaningful. This shift emphasizes metrics for nurturing and improving educators over those focused on penalizing or firing them. It channels the right types and levels of resources to schools serving disadvantaged students, so that every student’s social, physical, and emotional needs are met, and teachers and principals can focus on teaching and leading and improving their craft.
School leadership is increasingly recognized as another critical factor to drawing and retaining great teachers and improving their individual and joint efforts. The Wallace Foundation’s work to demonstrate how school leadership can improve teaching and learning …
Using data well to improve instruction and ensuring time for teacher collaboration are central to comprehensive school improvement efforts. This 2016 report by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) and SCOPE aims to help California’s schools best …
Establishing an even educational playing field so that all children enter kindergarten prepared to learn and thrive requires supports for children, their parents, and their caregivers from birth. And ensuring equal opportunities to learn requires support for children’s physical and mental health. A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education advances enriching experiences with nurturing, knowledgeable adults throughout the day and all year, in order to promote children’s strong cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral development.
Schools and educators serving students with higher needs need the resources to do so effectively. A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education advances policies that establish strong standards and curriculum in all schools and ensure sufficient funding for high-needs schools to reach them. BBA promotes supports-based accountability systems focused on improving instruction and strategies to desegregate schools and deconcentrate poverty within them, so that educators and students have a strong context in which to teach and learn.
Effective, sustainable school improvement efforts merge research-based evidence of effective ways to mitigate the impacts of poverty with community input regarding the district’s unique assets and needs. A Broader, Bolder Approach highlights the need for key community voices – including educators, parents, students, and faith and business leaders – to be at the center of developing and implementing education reforms.