2007 Education Trust National Conference

This session will provide participants with a synthesis of compelling research, program and policy recommendations, and effective classroom strategies based on findings from 18 state and national studies of high poverty/higher performance schools. Improvements in curriculum, instruction, assessment and data literacy, reorganization of time, space and resources, and parent and community engagement contributed to the success of these schools. The presentation will include descriptions of K-12 high achieving schools with significant population of low SES students.

Join us to learn about two of three programs in the nation using a teacher residency model to prepare and support teachers to be successful with students. Program directors and their colleagues will describe the concept of the programs, the components, the challenges and successes they have faced in preparing resident teachers to be effective with their students. Whether you are interested in starting your own program or focusing on better preparing and supporting new teachers, this session will help you to take those next steps.

This presentation and panel discussion will focus on what can be done for the millions of high-achieving students from the bottom economic half. In the first 15 minutes, Mr. Wyner will introduce the Foundation’s research and provide an overview of the data on high-achieving low-income youth around the country. The panelists will describe their work and consider the strategies for helping this population as part of the larger context of education reform. Panelists and attendees will discuss the specific needs of low-income high-achieving students and the education reform implications.

The state of Michigan has made big strides in education policy by instituting a rigorous set of graduation requirements and a high school assessment that combines state standards with the ACT college admissions test. In this session, participants will hear from Michigan principals about how they support these policy changes in curriculum and assessment, and what they have learned about the political process and the power of educators to seize the pro-reform agenda.

The presenters will explain the design and implementation of an inter-institutional standards alignment project and the development and application of a rubric for assessing college-ready writing skills. The presenters will provide an overview of P-16 standards alignment initiatives in Minnesota, including Ready or Not Writing, an online “drop box” to which high school students submit essays for college-readiness assessment by college instructors.

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The National Center for Urban School Transformation (NCUST) offers a National Excellence in Urban Education Award. In this session, we will describe our process for identifying nominees and vetting applications. We will emphasize the data that lead us to exclude schools from further consideration. We will present data tables describing the demographics and the achievement levels of each of our 17 finalists for the award. In particular, we will share disaggregated state achievement results for our finalists in a way that contrasts with similar schools and state averages.

Carver’s extended day program targets Grade 1 through Grade 5 students who need additional support in various content areas. This workshop will provide participants with a snapshot of a successful extended day model. Presenters will make available information on scheduling, implementation and assessment.

In this session, school district and university partners will share their experiences in developing and implementing California’s Early Assessment Program (EAP) and Expository Reading and Writing Course. The purpose of these initiatives is to improve high school students’ preparation for college and careers. Session presenters will provide an overview of the key components of EAP, including the course. The session will highlight one teacher and her students’ results.

This presentation illustrates the processes and experiences of a successful school reform project. Transformation is occurring because of partnerships across the board: university, school district, administrators, teachers, community, parents, and students. Participants will learn about partnership building, communication, data collection and analysis, and intentional planning. For Berea College GEAR Up, the result is an environment and structure that has laid a strong foundation for school reform.

School systems that raise achievement and narrow the quality gap also narrow the fairness gap between groups of students. The reason for this simultaneous benefit to both advantaged and disadvantaged students is illustrated and explained in detail. The talk discusses the ideas and the practices that have hindered the narrowing of the quality and fairness gaps, and describes the concrete steps we need to take right now to narrow both of them significantly.

Speaker:
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Chairman and Founder, The Core Knowledge Foundation

The Core Knowledge program developed by Keynote Speaker E.D. Hirsch starts with the assumption that schools must systematically introduce children—particularly children of poverty—to the knowledge and vocabulary that will permit them to read complex, sophisticated texts. In this session, two urban schools serving substantial populations of children of poverty and children of color, 2007 Dispelling the Myth award winner Osmond A.

This session will show how one district was able to allocate resources based on the needs of schools in a manner that was supported by staff and the community. For example, one school received $114 per pupil in literacy funding while another received only $36 per student. Learn how the teacher contract was changed to provide a system for teachers to transfer out of schools when necessary.

Presenter:
Tom Henry, Deputy Superintendent/Chief Academic Officer, Eugene School District 4J, Eugene, OR

Strand 1: K-12 Improvement

This interactive session will address common barriers to parental involvement in urban school settings. The presenters will identify and examine common themes that have surfaced from focus groups and orientations conducted with Hispanic parents in a secondary high school. The presenters will share with the audience manageable and pragmatic strategies that can be implemented in grades K-12 to promote parental involvement in schools, thus increasing student achievement and closing the gap in student learning.

This presentation highlights the key strategies and reform models that the National Governors’ Association High School Honor States are using to leverage significant change in state education policy. Participants will learn how state leaders design and implement policies that intended to increase graduation rates, stimulate more relevant and rigorous coursework, and make student transitions seamless so that every student graduates from high school ready to succeed in college and career.

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The presentation will define the elements of high-quality induction programs for new educators, and detail associated outcomes including increased teacher retention and teacher effectiveness. It will feature emerging cost-benefit research that demonstrates that high-quality induction provides a positive return on investment for states, school districts, teachers and students.

From the school schedule—which has built-in “rescue classes” and tutorials, as well as regular times for teachers to meet—to the careful attention to achievement data that show how each student is doing, faculty and administrators at Lockhart Junior High School work hard to match their actions to their motto, “100 percent Success, Every Child, Every Time.” The student body is more than 50 percent Hispanic and more than 50 percent low-income.

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Panelist will discuss how they use AP Potential™ to identify students for success in Advanced Placement (AP®) classes, as well as the other benefits of using the PSAT/NMSQT®, its diagnostics and data reports, to identify individual student strengths and weaknesses, as well as curriculum gaps. They will share their successes and their tips for smooth implementation as well as the steps necessary for ensuring that teachers are prepared to teach a broad range of students in AP courses.

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The California State University, which prepares more than 12,000 new teachers yearly, is evaluating the impact of teacher education programs on K-12 student learning. The evaluation focuses on K-12 achievement gaps that victimize students of color and children of poverty. In this session, the University will share its findings about teacher education programs that are most effective in promoting K-12 learning and in reducing and closing K-12 gaps. Results will be presented graphically and discussed interactively with audience members.

This presentation describes one elementary school’s emphasis on college readiness through our theme, “College Begins in Kindergarten.” Our school-wide framework articulates the building blocks for college readiness through academic, social, and emotional support for parents and students in a variety of areas. Through strong parent and community partnerships, we provide opportunities for our high poverty, Hispanic families to overcome existing barriers to pursuing a college education.

All too often we think of reading merely as translating written symbols into words spoken aloud or silently. Although a student must know the vocabulary words to understand what she’s reading, the importance of background knowledge goes far beyond that. The session will describe six ways that background knowledge facilitates reading comprehension, and why knowledge is a prerequisite for comprehension. In addition, we’ll consider some of the practical consequences of that fact, particularly for disadvantaged students, as well as some thoughts on the implications for the classroom.

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The Houston Independent School District, Houston, TX and the Guilford County Schools, Greensboro, NC uses a value added analysis of standardized test scores to make school improvement decisions. Both districts work with Dr. William Sanders from the SAS Institute in Cary, NC, who factors out issues such as socio-economic background, economic level of the mother, etc., to determine the academic impact a teacher’s performance has on the students he or she teaches. The districts use this information to determine which teachers earn merit pay bonuses.

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This session discusses “practices worthy of attention” (PWOA), which are current school and district practices that show promise in improving students’ secondary mathematics performance, especially for those that have had challenges in succeeding in mathematics. The first part of this project was to learn about what practices schools/districts are involved in and find the current practices that show promise and change. This session talks about the different practices found in this nationwide search and the process for analyzing each PWOA.

This presentation describes a collaborative initiative to remove systemic barriers to instructional improvement between a local education fund (LEF) and a large urban school district. Issues included are the distribution of students with disabilities and those at risk of dropping out, and the resources that follow these challenging populations. Participants will learn about LEF/district collaboration, a systemic approach to supporting schools centrally, and how to connect schools and central office.

Achieving resource equity in public education remains an elusive goal. While there has been a lot of attention and some progress in getting states to take more responsibility for narrowing funding gaps between districts, resource gaps within school districts remain large and largely hidden from public scrutiny. However, some school districts are developing weighted student funding policies to increase equity and transparency among school budgets.

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that there are vast differences in how effective various urban districts are in teaching mathematics to low income and ethnic minority students. We will explore explanations for these differences as well as some new practices worthy of attention in some high-performing districts. We will pay special attention to new strategies for addressing the mathematics learning needs of English language learners, students with special needs, and students who are disengaged from school.

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This interactive workshop will focus on how school leaders, community groups, and other key players in the education community can communicate effectively about schools’ gap-closing efforts. Education Trust staff and education news reporters will explore strategies and tools to help schools share information about their efforts with a broader audience and examine the best ways to work with journalists.

There is a great demand on schools and districts to prepare all students to proficient levels of performance and beyond. To make sure this happens more quickly, local community advocates must work alongside educators in support of aggressive improvement efforts. This interactive session will focus on several big issues: