Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center

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Current Newsletter

We hope our monthly newsletter is a useful resource and welcome your feedback and ideas. Our purpose is to keep you informed and provide access to source materials about critical issues relating to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with a focus on educator effectiveness, school improvement, and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) implementation.

Montana Schools of Promise: The Story of Montana’s School Improvement Grant (SIG) Model

Turning around persistently low-performing schools is a critical problem facing our nation. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education launched an ambitious effort to address that challenge, investing $3.5 billion to fund the School Improvement Grant’s (SIG) Recovery Act program. As part of that initiative, funded under a combination of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and Title I School Improvement funding of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Montana received $11.57 million to support SIG-eligible schools.

The Montana Office of Public Instruction released a report tracing the process involved in identifying schools in need of improvement and developing and implementing plans to turn around those schools. The report offers the state’s educational stakeholders some insight into the multiyear process as well as holding lessons for others involved in the challenging work of school turnaround.

Montana Office of Public Instruction

How Career and Technical Education Can Help Students Be College and Career Ready: A Primer

The College & Career Readiness & Success Center released a brief providing an overview of the evolution of career technical education (CTE) in the U.S. The brief reviews what CTE looks like in practice and highlights issues CTE faces in the field that must be overcome for it to become an impactful and wide-reaching strategy for preparing students for postsecondary success. It also discusses the importance of these programs for allowing students the opportunities to acquire the competencies required in today’s workplace and to learn about different careers by experiencing work and workplaces.

College & Career Readiness & Success Center

Evaluating Evaluations: Using Teacher Surveys to Strengthen Implementation

The Aspen Institute released a report exploring why targeted well-designed and well-executed surveys can greatly benefit evaluation system reforms. The report describes how to get the most out of surveys in the teacher evaluation process by identifying several practices that are critical to effectively surveying employees and utilizing the information to improve individual and organizational practice. The report concludes with case studies outlining how organizations have successfully implemented this “virtuous feedback cycle.”

Aspen Institute

Developing Assessments of Deeper Learning: The Costs and Benefits of Using Tests that Help Students Learn

The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education released a report arguing that the resources that are currently spent on student testing could support much higher quality assessments, including performance tasks that include critical thinking and problem solving skills. To do this, states and districts will need to implement a combination of:

  • Cost savings, such as the economies of scale enabled by state consortia, online delivery, and efficient scoring of open-ended tasks by teachers and computers.
  • Strategic reallocation of resources that are currently used for state and local testing in fragmented ways and that are not focused on improved assessment quality.
  • Use of professional learning time and incentives to support teacher engagement in assessment scoring, development, and use, which provides the double benefit of improved instruction and more efficient use of resources.
Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

What Does it Take to Scale Up Innovations?

This brief from the National Education Policy Center discusses the problem of scaling innovations in education in the United States so that they can serve very large numbers of students. The brief outlines the issues involved, develops a set of five criteria for assessing challenges of scaling, and then uses three programs widely discussed in the U.S. as examples of the challenges involved: Teach for America (an approach to teacher development), KIPP (a whole-school reform model), and the Harlem Children’s Zone (a school-plus-community model). Five criteria are applied to assess scalability: cost, human capacity, tools and infrastructure, political support, and external or non-school factor.

National Education Policy Center

A Blueprint for R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching

The U.S. Department of Education released a framework for parents, students, educators, policymakers, business and community leaders, elected officials, and other partners to use in guiding collective efforts to strengthen America’s public education system by rethinking teaching and leading.

The RESPECT program has seven components: Creating a culture of shared responsibility; recruiting top talent; using evaluations to promote effective teaching; using professional development to support continuous growth; establishing a "career continuum" to generate advanced leadership roles and compensation for superb teachers; creating "conditions for success," such as restructuring the school day to support teacher collaboration; and partnering with communities.

U.S. Department of Education

Quakertown Community School District: A Systematic Approach to Blended Learning That Focuses on District Leadership, Staffing, and Cost-effectiveness

The Alliance for Excellent Education released the first in a series of interactive video profiles highlighting innovative school districts that utilize digital learning to improve teaching and learning. This interactive video profile of the Quakertown Community School District (QCSD) provides readers with a real-life, practical story about how district and school leaders are working to improve student learning outcomes through the effective use of digital learning. It examines how QCSD—a small, K–12 public school district in rural southeastern Pennsylvania—worked with important partners, including its local teachers’ union, to improve student outcomes using effective applications of technology and blended learning strategies.

Alliance for Excellent Education

Expanding College Opportunities for High-Achieving, Low Income Students

The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research released a report examining the issue that only a minority of high-achieving, low-income students apply to colleges in the same way that other high-achieving students do: applying to several selective colleges whose curriculum is designed for students with a level of achievement like their own. This is despite the fact that selective colleges typically cost the high-achieving, low-income students less while offering them more generous resources than the non-selective postsecondary institutions they mainly attend. In this study, the authors use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate interventions that provide students with semi-customized information on the application process and colleges' net costs. The interventions also provide students with no-paperwork application fee waivers. The ECO Comprehensive (ECO-C) Intervention costs about $6 per student, and they find that it causes high-achieving, low-income students to apply and be admitted to more colleges, especially those with high graduation rates and generous instructional resources. The students respond to their enlarged opportunity sets by enrolling in colleges that have stronger academic records, higher graduation rates, and more generous resources. Their freshman grades are as good as the control students', despite the fact that the control students attend less selective colleges and therefore compete with peers whose incoming preparation is substantially inferior. Benefit-to-cost ratios for the ECO-C Intervention are extremely high, even under the most conservative assumptions.

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

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