Getting Smart
By Bonnie Lathram and David Potter
Here’s why global should be the education movement of 2017: school improvement.
School improvement is difficult. A US Department of Education report released last week on the five-year, $7 billion dollar School Improvement Grants (SIG), highlighted this difficulty, finding that the largest-ever national intervention to improve failing schools was ineffective:
- SIG-funded models had no statistically significant impact on test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment,
- There were no statistically significant impacts on student outcomes within student and school subgroups, and
- In elementary grades, there was no evidence that one model was more effective at improving student achievement than another
We have had several years to look closely at school improvement models. And now we are asking, what is working? What does the research show? Where is improvement happening? How can we collaborate and learn together to share what is working both across the country and around the globe? Read more…