CTAC
Partners Make Headlines
September 2011
CTAC
congratulates two of its partners whose successes in reform and student
achievement gains made them headliners this week:
- The
Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, a CTAC
partner since 2007, won the prestigious Broad Prize 2011 for being the
best urban school district in America. Announced this year on September
20, the prize is awarded annually by the Broad Foundation to the urban
district that demonstrates the greatest overall performance and
improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps
among poor and minority students. This year it carried an award of
$550,000 that will be distributed as college scholarships to the
district’s high school students.
Exemplary
practices cited by the foundation included the district’s
efforts to strengthen and energize personnel and leaders, partly
through its Leadership for Educators’ Advanced Performance (LEAP)
program, initiated in 2008 in partnership with CTAC. Supported by a
Teacher Incentive Fund grant from the U.S. Department of Education,
LEAP is a performance-based compensation program. CTAC is LEAP’s
project evaluator and technical assistance provider. Teachers receive
bonuses partly based on their students’ achieving “student learning
objectives” (SLOs)—developed by teachers using CTAC’s SLO process.
- The
Murkland School in Lowell, Massachusetts showed the biggest gains
of all 35 Massachusetts schools designated “Level 4” last year for
persistently low performance. While 22 of the schools made combined
gains of 5 percent or higher in English and math scores on the
state
test, the Murkland School had a 13 point gain in English and a 20 point
gain in math. That not only exceeded all other schools but also meant
that the Murkland met its three-year target in the first year.
Charged
with the task of turning around the district’s lowest performing
schools, Lowell Public Schools partnered with CTAC in 2010 to implement
its Standard
Bearer Schools process—a research based process designed
to build and sustain highly effective schools. Involving staff and the
community at large, this process helped the Murkland School identify
and address root causes for its persistently low performance. The
result, most notably, was an intensified emphasis on building the
internal capacity and expertise of staff to analyze student performance
data and use findings to improve teaching and learning—a shift that led
to the unprecedented level of student growth. Chris Scott, Ph.D., who
served as Superintendent of Lowell Public Schools from 2008 – 2011,
joined CTAC’s staff this summer as Senior Associate, National School
Reform and Superintendent-in-Residence.
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