“Education is a top priority of this administration,” said Governor McCrory. “Eric has the thorough understanding of education that this position needs. His passion for narrowing the achievement gap in public schools will drive North Carolina ahead.”

The Senior Education Advisor’s responsibilities include reviewing all facets of public education; pre-K, K-12, North Carolina Community Colleges and Universities.  Just some of the opportunities and challenges include coordinating the pre-K program, analyzing and sharing budgets for all public education entities, reviewing Race to the Top grants, and establishing more high quality public school options for all of North Carolina’s students.  Another area of focus is getting the latest technology in the classroom to help advance our students’ academic achievement.  He’ll also advise the E-learning Task Force.   Guckian will work directly with Governor McCrory, State Board of Education Chairman Bill Cobey and the recently reprised North Carolina Education Cabinet.

“I am honored and humbled to serve as a member of Governor McCrory’s team,” said Guckian. “This is a critical time for education in our state, and I’m looking forward to working with committed teachers, leaders and community members to ensure that all of North Carolina’s students, regardless of circumstance, achieve an excellent education that will put them on the pathway to a better life; a life of honor, prosperity and service.”

Guckian joins the McCrory administration after serving as the regional executive director of New Leaders, a national nonprofit in Charlotte, NC that works to develop transformational school leaders and advance educational policies that enable all students to succeed. Prior to his time at New Leaders, Guckian led Teach for America in North Carolina when TFA teachers in North Carolina had the highest student achievement outcomes in the country according to ABC Accountability results and national metrics. Guckian has taught in public schools in North Carolina and New York.  He earned a Master of Education degree from Harvard University and received his Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University.

• The creation of multiple charter-school networks where low-income children achieve high academic performance. Networks such as KIPP, YES, Uncommon Schools, Success Academies, Mastery, Alliance, IDEA, Achievement First, and many others show conclusively that students of all races and income levels have the capacity to excel when taught effectively.

• Better methods for attracting, training, and retaining new teaching talent, such as Teach For America and TNTP; the Teach Plus network providing professional growth for high-performing teachers who want to stay in the classroom; new teacher college models such as the Relay Graduate School of Education, High Tech High, and UTeach; and education leadership programs such as New Leaders, the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program, and the Broad Superintendents Academy.

• The development of blended-learning models and tools such as Rocketship, Carpe Diem, Summit Prep, and Khan Academy that combine the best of online and classroom instruction.

• New business models for Catholic education, including the Cristo Rey network of work-study high schools, diocese-wide scholarship funds, and lay governance structures that free priests from school management.

• The expansion of vouchers, tax credits, Education Savings Accounts, and other forms of school choice that enable growing numbers of low-income students in Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states to attend private schools.

• Through a combination of philanthropy and political/advocacy giving, the creation of political cultures committed to public-school reform. Some of the most dramatic success stories include Tennessee and Philadelphia, which offer leadership models for turning around failing public schools; Houston, where the superintendent talks publicly of how the school district should learn from the success of the KIPP and YES charter networks; Washington, D.C., where Chancellor Kaya Henderson is continuing the reform agenda of Michelle Rhee; and New Orleans, the most option-rich city in the nation, with over 80 percent of children attending charter schools.

A striking feature here is the creation of a philanthropic reform movement consisting of donors and foundations from across the political spectrum. There is no other area of philanthropy today where liberal, centrist, and conservative donors work more closely in finding solutions for a national crisis.
And many solutions still need to be found. To build on its achievements, it will be important for the K–12 reform philanthropy movement to address the following challenges in the coming decade:

• So far, no transformational programs or organizations have proven readily scalable on a national level. Nor have we seen any city or state yet achieve truly dramatic improvements in education comparable, say, to the 75 percent reduction in crime in New York City over the past 20 years.

• The greater focus on our lowest-achieving students has come at the expense of our highest-achieving students, all too many of whom attend mediocre suburban schools that are uncompetitive internationally, especially in math and science.

• While technology offers extraordinary promise for individualizing education and providing rapid feedback for students, freeing teachers from drudge responsibilities, expanding education options in rural schools, and lowering costs, the successful application of technology to education is still in its infancy.

• A college-for-all emphasis at many high-performing K–12 schools has not yet translated into college completion for low-income students, and it has prevented the development of high-level vocational and career programs.

• There are too few options for rural students, who are really no better off in terms of educational opportunities than they were decades ago. (This may change with blended learning.)

The Philanthropy Roundtable has played an important leadership role in building the reform philanthropic movement in K–12 education, showcasing successful strategies, and calling donors’ attention to the challenges ahead. Please contact me or Dan Fishman, our director of K–12 programs, if you are interested in finding solutions for this national crisis through your charitable giving. If you have a special interest in digital learning or Catholic education, please contact Anthony Pienta, our deputy director of K–12 programs. We are at your service in helping you forge effective K–12 philanthropic strategies and in connecting you with the best minds, including other donors, in the fields where you would like to make a difference.

Read article at philanthropyroundtable.org >>

Thursday, chamber leaders hosted a panel discussion with educators to try and find new ways to recruit and retain teachers.

It was a meeting of the minds in Charlotte. Educators, local leaders and chamber members out their heads together to come up with new ways to improve the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district.

“Based not just on test scores but based on the things that we all know successful teachers and leaders do. They have a vision, they have a common definition of what excellence is and everybody has a common goal,” said Eric Guckian with New Leaders Charlotte.

New Leaders Charlotte is a group that works to improve schools and close the achievement gap. Guckian said putting more focus on teacher recruitment is critical to student success.

“The best thing that we can do is drive our resource and our time towards the teachers and the leaders that are in the building driving the change,” he said.

It’s just one reason Guckian said community engagement is essential to help shape the next wave of leaders.

“This is the civil rights cause of our generation and we have to get this right. There are too many kids that are being left behind,” said Guckian.

Leaders with other organizations took part in the panel including:

• Teach for America
• Project Lift
• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

Read original article >>

While principals increasingly are moving to center stage in national debates over school improvement, a new study finds most states have little or no information about how their principals are prepared, licensed, supported, and evaluated.

The Dallas-based George W. Bush Institute was expected to release an analysis of all 50 states’ principal policies and related data collections in Washington this week. It finds that even states with otherwise comprehensive longitudinal-data systems collect limited information about principals, particularly on their preparation.

“Despite the growing body of research, most states are not requiring the use of evidence on principal quality in policy,” said Kerry Ann Moll, a co-author of the report and the program director for the Bush Institute’s Alliance to Reform Education Leadership.

“Seven states couldn’t even tell us how many licenses they give each year,” Ms. Moll said. “That’s a big basic-data problem.”

For some states, she said, collecting data on principals “was not even on their radar,” but others, like Rhode Island, are creating comprehensive systems to follow principals from their training programs through licensing, placement, and school leadership.

According to an analysis by the Washington-based Data Quality Campaign, a majority of states now collect data on teacher preparation and effectiveness, but, “you can’t just pull information on teachers and principals and assume the data needed is going to be the same for both,” Ms. Moll said. “There are nuances there.”

The study, based on a survey of state education leaders in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, identifies five key responsibilities of an effective school leader:

• Recruiting and selecting teachers;
• Developing and supporting teachers;
• Assessing and rewarding teachers;
• Using data to drive instruction; and
• Developing a positive school culture.

“I do think we are asking more of principals than we’ve ever asked before,” said Benjamin Fenton, the chief strategy officer and a co-founder of the New York City-based principal-preparation program New Leaders. These include making principals lead academics, manage personnel, and keep tabs on the finances of their campuses.

Mr. Fenton was not connected to the report, but was scheduled to comment on it during a briefing on the release at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington.

“One of the biggest things we have to ask of our principals now is that they are very skilled in being leaders of leaders, developing the leadership skills in other staff,” he said. “For some of the [preparation] programs, this is a bigger and bigger focus.”

The Bush Institute is a nonprofit foundation that explores education reform among other issues.

‘Outcomes’ Slighted

Most states make few connections between their principal-preparation programs and the eventual careers of program students, the study found. Fewer than half of states require principal-training programs to report what happens to their graduates, and 19 could not say how many new aspiring principals graduate each year.

Poor alignment between training programs and districts’ needs can lead to cyclical principal shortages, Ms. Moll said—a particular problem for rural districts.

While 47 states reported they have adopted standards for principal effectiveness, Ms. Moll and her colleagues found that just 17 states include learning outcomes when evaluating principal-preparation programs. Only six states—Connecticut, Georgia, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington—use some evidence of effectiveness in renewing principals’ licenses.

“There are certainly technological challenges within this, but still I was surprised at how few [states] even collected outcomes data [on principals], much less used it,” Mr. Fenton said.

Florida Commissioner of Education Tony Bennett, who just came to the post after being defeated for re-election as Indiana’s state superintendent, said it is important for states to establish criteria to evaluate principals’ effectiveness.

Although most states do not have “value added” systems to evaluate principals, Mr. Bennett said state and district administrators still can identify whether a principal is effective by using data they likely already have on hand: schools’ achievement status and teacher-quality ratings.

“There must be fidelity between the school performance and the effectiveness of the teachers, and that is the job of the principal,” Mr. Bennett said.

For example, if a school has low overall performance but a high percentage of teachers rated as highly effective, “that’s a principal problem,” Mr. Bennett said, because the school leader either is not evaluating his or her teachers effectively or not adequately supporting them.

“The principal is responsible for the sum total of the learning in that building,” Mr. Bennett said.

Looking at Licensure

The study found more states are beginning to look at ways to evaluate principals’ effectiveness. For example, Louisiana is now requiring principals to prove they have been rated as effective three years out of the last five in order to keep their licenses.

In May, the Bush Institute plans to issue a follow-up study looking at the financial aspects of school leadership. “Principals are still responsible for multimillion-dollar budgets,” Ms. Moll said. “They’re CEOs of their campuses, and they’re not prepared for that.”

The institute also plans to conduct additional surveys and case studies on principal data collection. “I believe seven to 10 years from now, we may not be talking about teacher quality and teacher-effectiveness models,” Mr. Bennett said. “We will be evaluating schools and holding principals responsible, because then principals will hold teachers accountable and hold the values that drive student achievement at a high level.”

Mr. Fenton agreed. “When we look at the teacher-quality talk going on, it’s hugely important,” he said, “but if we don’t have an equal focus on principal quality, there’s a worry these reforms won’t have the impact on student improvement that we’re hoping for. Teacher surveys consistently report the quality of the school leader as critical to whether they are going to stay in the school and career.”

New Leaders CEO Jean Desravines said, “Research shows that effective school leaders have a tremendous impact on student achievement by attracting, retaining, and developing our greatest teachers and ensuring strong instruction and learning for all of their students.  Unfortunately, world-class products and services are not readily available to help school systems identify and develop excellent school leaders.”

Desravines added, “In today’s technology-driven world, we all need on-going professional development to stay competitive – and that’s especially true for our school leaders who are charged with ensuring our students are competitive with their global peers. By combining the capabilities of New Leaders with Pearson, we can rapidly scale the critical work of transforming school performance by helping states and districts identify and develop highly effective leaders.”

New Leaders and Pearson are coming together to meet this need by creating tools and professional learning opportunities designed to support school and district leadership development efforts and build leaders’ strengths in instructional leadership, managing teacher effectiveness, and continuous improvement practices. The tools and learning opportunities will include a framework for principal excellence, evaluation rubrics to assess principals’ performance, training for principal evaluators, and web-based professional development modules.

Will Ethridge, Pearson’s CEO of North American Education, said, “This partnership is a unique opportunity for us to combine programs and technologies from Pearson’s School Achievement Services, which is dedicated to providing high quality professional learning to educators, with the ground-breaking work that New Leaders has been doing for the past 12 years.  One of the key components to our partnership with New Leaders is their substantial research in high-poverty schools and work with successful principals that has led to new models to transform those schools that are serving our poorest and most underserved children. Our Pearson teams will scale and share these solutions across the U.S.”

Alison Wagner, Pearson’s School Achievement Services President, noted, “To succeed in meeting the expectations of the Common Core, we will need leaders who are prepared to provide their faculties with the regular planning, coaching, and evidence-based feedback teachers need as they make these instructional changes.  The solutions we will create with New Leaders will help states and districts develop school leaders who are ready to play this crucial role.”

ABOUT NEW LEADERS

New Leaders is a national nonprofit that develops transformational school leaders and promotes the system-level conditions that allow strong leaders to succeed. Founded in 2000, New Leaders has trained more than 900 school leaders who are raising student achievement and graduation rates in high-need schools across the country. Beyond its signature principal training program, New Leaders conducts leadership development with existing school and district administrators, and designs effective leadership policies and practices for school systems nationwide. For more information, visit www.newleaders.org.

ABOUT PEARSON

Pearson (NYSE:PSO), the global leader in education and learning technology, aims to help people make progress in life through learning.  Pearson’s leadership spans pre-K12, higher education, and corporate learning globally. Pearson’s other primary businesses include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group. For more on Pearson School, visit www.pearsonschool.com.

RICHMOND, Calif., December 19, 2012 – Six Richmond area nonprofit organizations have been selected to receive a share of $1 million in grants from Chevron as part of the company’s California Partnership Program, an initiative that invests in education and economic development in California.

The grants will expand access to high-quality science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educational opportunities, with a focus on working directly with the West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD) to improve the quality of education in local schools. In addition, the grants will help increase and sustain economic development opportunities for families in Richmond and West Contra Costa County because the entities receiving the grants offer comprehensive services that improve self-sufficiency and help small businesses create and sustain jobs.

“Chevron is committed to boosting Richmond’s economic development and improving the quality of life for local residents,” said Heather Kulp, Public Affairs Manager for Chevron’s Richmond Refinery. “We believe that investing in these key areas will create a stronger, healthier Richmond economy, which is not only good for people living in this community but is also good for the long-term success of the local business community.”

The six programs selected to receive grants in 2012 are:

STEM Energy for Learning Grants

• West County Bridge to College (WCCUSD): $200,000
  Create a summer and academic year support program to better prepare WCCUSD high school students in mathematics so that they can enter Contra Costa College at the College Algebra level or higher.
• Deepening the Real World STEM Connection (Contra Costa Economic Partnership): $200,000
  Help improve student achievement by providing work-based learning opportunities and STEM curriculum support and helping students transition from high school to postsecondary education, training and high-demand careers.
• Emerging Leaders Program (New Leaders™): $100,000
  An innovative leadership development program that will build the leadership capacity of promising WCCUSD teachers; help improve student achievement, including achievement in STEM fields; and build a pipeline of outstanding future leaders to have a broad and lasting impact on STEM education.

Economic Self-Sufficiency Grants

• Project Access Mentoring Program (Catholic Charities of the East Bay): $200,000
  Help and support low-income, limited-English-proficient Richmond and West County residents to secure employment as Early Childhood Education (ECE) Associate Teachers and support limited-English-speaking residents who are currently working as ECE Associates.
• Work Incentives for Residents and Employers (Rubicon Programs): $175,000
  Help and support joint efforts with East Bay employers to obtain jobs for low-income West Contra Costa County residents by providing comprehensive job readiness training, job placement assistance, and ongoing career coaching.
• Springboard (Community Housing Development Corporation): $125,000
  Help to create or expand new small/micro businesses by providing financial education and coaching and matching the savings of low income West Contra Costa County entrepreneurs.

“We are grateful for Chevron’s generosity,” said Phil Gonsalves, director of math curriculum and instruction for the WCCUSD. “This grant will help to improve student mathematics achievement and better prepare students for success in advanced mathematics courses at Contra Costa College.”

Grant recipients were selected through a competitive process based upon an assessment of their capacity and ability to improve education, expand vocational training and increase job opportunities in Richmond and West Contra Costa County. Each proposal was evaluated through an open request for proposal (RFP) process, and scored by an evaluation committee based upon criteria that included the evaluation of the nonprofits’ technical approach, capacity to implement the project and management plan.

“We share Chevron’s commitment to creating meaningful economic opportunities for those in our community who need them the most,” said Executive Director Jane Fischberg of Rubicon Programs. “This grant will allow us to provide comprehensive job readiness training, job placement assistance, and ongoing career coaching to 45 clients, and offer subsidies to employers that hire our clients.”

Chevron started the California Partnership in 2009. Since then, it has helped dozens of nonprofit organizations geared toward economic development and STEM education in and around California. Chevron has committed nearly $30 million in giving through the California Partnership since 2009, investing in programs that have benefitted more than half a million students and 6,600 teachers, provided some 13,000 new STEM resources for students, helped train more than 10,000 people through job training programs, enabled 2,700 people to secure employment, and benefitted 2,500 small businesses.

About Chevron
Chevron is one of the world’s leading integrated energy companies, with subsidiaries that conduct business worldwide. The company is involved in virtually every facet of the energy industry. Chevron explores for, produces and transports crude oil and natural gas; refines, markets and distributes transportation fuels and lubricants; manufactures and sells petrochemical products; generates power and produces geothermal energy; provides energy efficiency solutions; and develops the energy resources of the future, including biofuels. Chevron is based in San Ramon, Calif. More information about Chevron is available at www.chevron.com.

New Leaders ranked among the top 5 highest scorers out of more than 727 distinct projects requesting grants. New Leaders will continue to follow the process to secure this funding, including identifying $1.5 million dollars in matching private funding.

“New Leaders is incredibly grateful to the Department of Education for this show of confidence in our organization, specifically our work training and supporting exceptional school leaders who drive dramatic gains in schools throughout the country,” said New Leaders CEO Jean Desravines. “We are excited that the department has begun to provide a clear message on the importance of leadership as a focal point in their work to advance reform initiatives.  Secretary Duncan’s remarks this past weekend at the Council of Chief State School Officers confirmed that the department will place a growing emphasis on school leadership reforms in their second term and New Leaders is hoping to help move those efforts forward.”

New Leaders has seen the impact a great leader can have on a school since its creation 12 years ago. Earlier this year, New Leaders celebrated a number of successes for schools led by New Leader principals:

• New Leader David Pinder was named Washington, D.C.’s principal of the year after leading McKinley Technology High School to becoming a 90 percent proficient school and culminating in a National Blue Ribbon Award which less than one percent of schools nationwide achieve
• New Leader Quinhon Goodlowe led The Academy of College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, MD to achieve gains of 42 percentage points in high school assessment results, ranking the school among the top 10 of all high schools in Baltimore
• New Leader Claudia Aguirre and Dual-Language Middle School in New York City received an “A” in every category of its 2011-2012 Progress Report, the only school the district to do so

The i3 funding will allow New Leaders to move forward with its 2015 vision. Specifically, the organization will be able to:

• Accelerate student achievement by doubling the number of New Leaders that will be on pace to closing the achievement gap in their schools
• Increase the number of New Leaders in order to reach half a million students, the reach of the 4^th largest school district in the country
• Put in place principals specially trained to turn around failing schools and help ensure that major education reform efforts around teacher effectiveness, innovation and common core are carried out effectively

“New Leaders is serving an important role in our nation’s future by strengthening school leadership in the public education system which will help ensure students are prepared with the skills needed to keep the U.S. competitive and our communities healthy,” said Chris Chadwick, president of Boeing Military Aircraft and New Leaders board member. “Boeing is proud to partner with New Leaders and others to turn this vision into reality.”

Recent studies have shown that 96% of teachers say that they would stay teaching if they had a strong principal.  Based on our 12 years of experience recruiting and developing 900 principals, we have strong evidence to confirm the impact a strong principal has on attracting, retaining and developing the best teachers.

The research conducted to date on school leadership has focused on siloed actions of principals.  Playmakers is the first in-depth study to look at principal actions and teacher effectiveness across these siloes.  Furthermore, Playmakers examines these actions across school types and contexts, examining the differences between principals that lead their schools to dramatic student achievement gains of 20 percentage points or more on standardized assessments in a single year in comparison to those that lead schools to flat or incremental gains.

In Playmakers, 200 successful schools were studied to identify the day-to-day actions the strongest principals take to ensure great teaching and dramatic gains in academic outcomes for their students.

The core finding is that great principals amplified great teaching by working in and seamlessly integrating three intersecting areas:

1. Developing teachers.
2. Managing talent.
3. Creating a great place to work.

What’s important to note is that no two principals followed the same path of actions.  Though all principals worked within these three intersecting areas, we discovered that each school leader needed to assess their school community’s need and prioritize among these actions based on their specific context.

This is no different from a great CEO or a great coach – the best leaders don’t tell their people exactly how to get every aspect of the job done.  They focus on the right outcomes and choose the path and strategies that makes the most sense for who they have on the team.

Playmakers follows in the New Leaders tradition of releasing impactful reports based on the learning gleaned from our strongest school leaders and advancing related policy recommendations to support  and expand leadership capable of transforming all our urban public schools.

Previous research is clear that the best school leaders have an amplified impact on student achievement.  Playmakers lays out the core actions taken by the strongest school leaders to achieve that magnified impact.  These findings have implications on local, state, and national policies on school leadership which New Leaders believes must be at the forefront of education reform conversations in the coming years.

ABOUT NEW LEADERS
New Leaders is a national nonprofit that develops transformational school leaders and promotes the system-level conditions that allow strong leaders to succeed. Founded in 2000, New Leaders has trained more than 900 school leaders who are raising student achievement and graduation rates in high-need schools across the country. Beyond its signature principal training program, New Leaders conducts leadership development with existing school and district administrators, and designs effective leadership policies and practices for school systems nationwide. For more information, visit www.newleaders.org.

Contact Information
Terrence Kneisel
tkneisel@newleaders.org
401.440.3556

“The mission of The Morrison & Foerster Foundation is to give back to our communities through focused charitable giving,” said Paul Friedman, a member of the firm executive committee who chairs the Foundation. “We are proud to celebrate our Silver Anniversary by doing what we set out to do when we started the Foundation 25 years ago: to make a difference in our communities. The recipients of our anniversary grants were nominated by people in our firm. That is what we are about.”

Established in 1986 with $16,000 in seed funding, the Foundation has awarded over $33 million to nonprofit organizations, primarily at the local level, throughout the course of the past quarter century. Last year, the firm awarded $3.4 million to charities worldwide. This year marks the third time the Foundation has designated a special giving project, following $1 million programs in 2003 and 2006. The anniversary grants are made possible by setting aside a portion of the Foundation’s annual budget over a period of several years.

The Foundation is primarily funded by Morrison & Foerster partners, with additional contributions from other law firm staff and supporters. One highlight from the Foundation’s 2011 giving was Japanese earthquake/tsunami relief – Morrison & Foerster is the largest international law firms in Japan. The immediate and long-term needs of so many in Japan prompted the Foundation’s board to launch a fundraising campaign, which raised $832,000 to support organizations seeking to help vulnerable victims of the earthquake/tsunami, such as children, the elderly, and disabled people.

This year The Morrison & Foerster Foundation will award anniversary grants totaling $1.25 million to the following organizations:

• $277,500 to Children’s Law Center (http://www.childrenslawcenter.org) in Washington, D.C. to launch its Starting Life with a Solid Foundation Program to provide free legal services to families in need of early childhood intervention and early special education services in Washington, D.C.
• $250,000 to iMentor (http://www.imentor.org) in New York, NY to help launch its College Ready Initiative at three New York City public high schools, to ensure that more students from low-income communities graduate from high school and become first-generation college students.
• $250,000 to New Leaders (http://www.newleaders.org/locations/bay-area) in San Francisco, CA to train future leaders in public education through expansion of its Emerging Leaders Program for teachers, coaches, and assistant principals in Richmond, CA.
• $225,000 to The Richstone Family Center (http://www.richstonefamily.org) in Hawthorne, CA to launch its Care-A-Van mobile unit to provide easily accessible no- and low-cost counseling, parenting support, and community education for vulnerable children and their families at school and community sites in southwest Los Angeles.
• $165,000 to East Bay College Fund (http://www.eastbaycollegefund.org) in Oakland, CA to develop its College Access Program to serve students at three large Oakland high schools, and to provide a district-wide academic success and college guidance program for African-American young men.
• $100,000 to Businesses United in Investing, Lending and Development (BUILD) (http://www.build.org/dc) in Washington, D.C. to support BUILD’s strategic growth and impact in the Washington, D.C. region by expanding the number of at-risk high school students who are currently served through its hands-on entrepreneurship training and college preparation programs at existing BUILD schools while adding new partner schools in the city.

In addition, the Foundation will give ten grants of $25,000 each, for a total of $250,000, to the following nonprofit organizations:

• Advocates for Children of New York – New York, NY
• East Meets West Foundation in Oakland, Calif. for its Scholarship Program to Enhance Literacy and Learning (SPELL) in Vietnam
• Hathaway-Sycamores Child & Family Services – Los Angeles, CA
• Helping Young People Excel (HYPE) – Los Angeles, CA
• Legal Outreach – New York, NY
• Monarch School Project – San Diego, CA
• Ravenswood Education Foundation – East Palo Alto, CA
• Room to Read in San Francisco, Calif. for its Asia programs
• The Selma M. Levine School of Music – Washington, D.C.
• Wind Youth Services – Sacramento, CA

More information at http://www.mofo.com/The-Morrison–Foerster-Foundation-Celebrates-25th-Anniversary-With-15-Million-in-Grants-to-Youth-Charities-11-01-2012/

My visit was part of weeklong effort by ED’s senior staff to gain a glimpse into the daily work of principals, while also providing principals with the opportunity to discuss how federal policy, programs, and resources impact their schools. At the end of the week we joined the principals and Secretary Arne Duncan for a debrief at ED.

We asked each of the principals to tell us, if they had a check from the federal government, what would they invest in based on the needs of this school. When I asked Wanda this question, her response somewhat surprised me. She said building teacher capacity. On the one hand, I wasn’t surprised; Wanda had been trained to become a principal through New Leaders and it’s clear from my visit that she’s focused on instruction.

In our classroom visits, Wanda was on the laptop she carries around to take notes on what she observed of the classroom instruction. On one of our visits, two adults entered the room while we were there. I later learned one woman was the coach (let’s call her Monica) and the other was the coach’s coach (let’s call her Deborah). After they all observed the same teacher’s lesson, Wanda and Deborah were going to observe Monica giving feedback to the teacher so that they could build Monica’s skills but also to ensure alignment within and across teams.

We know the principal can’t do it all, so Wanda is building the capacity of her instructional leaders to help support and develop great teachers. Why was I surprised? Because Wanda walks between two buildings every day since neither of the two buildings can hold all of the students; because the playground is literally on the rooftop of the building; and because the gym may have been large enough for a standard court but nothing else.

So while Wanda could have easily focused on facilities, Wanda knew what her students were learning and the quality of the teaching to enable their learning was most important. I appreciated that.

We won’t get a highly effective teacher corps unless we have principals as instructional leaders who are surrounded by and supporting strong teacher leaders who in turn help teachers get better. DC Bilingual was one example of that idea in practice.

More at http://www.ed.gov/blog/2012/10/a-view-from-the-inside-ed-staff-observes-the-principals-perspective/