Disaggregation sounds like a complicated word with no place in real-world conversations about improving education. But it’s actually an important tool that allows educators to understand how different groups of students fare in schools. Each of the strategies mentioned in our last blog – that allowed Chicago educators to dive deeper into data and pull out student strengths through their commitment to asset framing – were made possible by disaggregation.
“If we have to remove dead weight, we will remove dead weight.” That’s what the assistant principal of Chicago’s Orr High School told me in 1998, when I asked him how he dealt with no-show students. What he meant was, they’d be dropped from the school rolls and handed a list of alternative schools to call.
In an important brief from the National Education Policy Center, William Mathis and Kevin Welner define “portfolio school reform”—a school district governance theory which originated at the Center on Reinventing Public Education: “A key, unifying element is the call for many neighborhood schools to be transformed into privately managed charter schools… The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager.
We are well into the high-pressure digital age and the interconnected global economy, and those realities have affected education and how students learn.
However, some non-technological strategies still prevail as young people navigate their ways out of high school and college and into the workforce...
In 2014, the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute and Network for College Success launched an innovative initiative to provide educators, policymakers and families with research, data and resources on the milestones that matter most for college success.
Over the last several years our team has been exploring the integral role of early learning leaders, both elementary school principals and center directors. In this guest post, Anisha Ford discusses new research on how these leaders impact their program climate. In 2019 we’ll continue digging into this important topic, including exploring how to best prepare center directors.
A new study says programs with strong organizational structures hold the key to effective early-childhood education, and lists exceptional administrators and collaborative teachers as the two most important components of those structures.
The study was conducted by researchers with the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund, or Ounce, a Chicago-based nonprofit that advocates for and provides high-quality early-childhood education...
Ten years ago, Elizabeth Dozier, an assistant principal at Harper High School in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood, took a big risk. She hung a giant board in the main hallway showing each ninth-grader’s academic progress under three headings: green for on-track, yellow for close to on-track and red for off-track.
That was a violation of Chicago school board policy. Many educators and parents would have been aghast to see students publicly labeled like that...
When I was a prekindergarten teacher, my young students always provided an exciting share of challenges. There were children who cried when their parents left in the morning and those who were always last to be picked up. There were loud children and shy children, potty mishaps, and naptimes that left me exhausted. But the issues that concerned me most weren’t the things that happened inside my classroom, but what happened outside – especially when children regularly missed days of school.