Example of a turnaround school

Turnaround charter getting high marks for college prep
By Martha Woodall

Inquirer Staff Writer

As Mastery Charter School at Thomas prepares for its first graduation next month, good news is pouring in to its South Philadelphia campus.

In a neighborhood where district high schools send 16 to 24 percent of their graduates to college, 93 percent of Thomas' seniors will attend.

It has been only five years since Mastery took on Thomas and became the first operator in the city to convert a troubled middle school into a charter. Yet Thomas was one of 22 charter schools nationwide lauded this spring by a New York educational-reform group for achieving dramatic academic gains with low-income students.

What's especially sweet for Mastery is that this year, for the first time in its nine-year history, Mastery students have cracked the Ivy League ceiling. One Mastery-Thomas grad will attend the University of Pennsylvania; another is bound for Columbia University.

"I'm thrilled," said Scott Gordon, Mastery's founder and chief executive officer, who recalled nervously handing hoagies to students at lunch on Mastery-Thomas' opening day in 2005.

"I remember how scared we were," the businessman-turned-educator said. "This was our first turnaround. It was a big deal."

Mastery is on the cusp of another milestone. In the fall, the charter organization will take over three elementary schools and for the first time will be able to educate children from the primary grades through high school.

It's the realization of a dream for Mastery, which opened its first charter in 2001 as a high school.

Mastery's success with the high school, a demanding college-prep model, led the Philadelphia School District's then-chief executive, Paul Vallas, and the School Reform Commission to ask Mastery to take on Thomas.

The next year Mastery tackled Shoemaker, a troubled middle school in West Philadelphia, and in 2007 took charge of Pickett, in Germantown.

Mastery has followed the approach it pioneered at Thomas: It turns middle schools into charters and adds a grade each year to reach 12. All four Mastery charters meet the academic standards of the federal No Child Left Behind Law and have for nearly every year they have existed.

Ten days ago, the SRC selected Mastery as one of six nonprofits that will take over low-performing district schools as part of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's Imagine 2014 initiative. Slated for conversion to Mastery charters are Harrity, Mann, and Smedley.

As charter conversions, the schools continue to enroll students from the neighborhood instead of drawing them from across the city, as most charter schools do.

When Mastery embarked on its turnaround at Thomas, staff members were not the only ones who were apprehensive. Students who had been seventh graders at Thomas Middle School were not sure what to expect that first day as they approached the building at 927 Johnston St. to begin eighth grade at Mastery-Thomas.

"At first I was nervous," said Keenan Burton-Sessons, 18. But then he noticed that once-dirty hallways were clean and that walls that had been scarred by graffiti in the spring were painted in bright, engaging colors.

"I thought, 'Oh, man. What is this?' "

Salma Zeb, 18, who had a string of substitute teachers for science and social studies for most of seventh grade, wasn't sure whether Mastery's changes went beyond the cosmetic.

"I expected disappointment because Thomas had disappointed me since the sixth grade," she said. "When I walked in, there were teachers standing there, shaking hands. It seemed like the atmosphere was so different, but I was still cynical. I had to give it time."

She and several classmates quickly decided the changes were genuine: Teachers had high expectations. Instruction continued after school and on Saturdays. Bad behavior was not tolerated. Students were expected to attend college. And at Thomas, where many seniors will be the first in their families to go, staff helped them navigate the maze of college applications.

Islam Hafairi, who will study aerospace engineering on the main campus of Pennsylvania State University, remembers sitting in the auditorium the first day, listening to the principal talk about all the changes.

"He was telling us what would be different," Hafairi said. "That's when most of us realized this wouldn't be like Thomas. We were here to learn, and we went on from there."

Mastery methodically moved students through their academic subjects; introduced Advanced Placement courses, including calculus, biology, and literature; required juniors to complete internships; and provided nurturing and support.

"It was like a new world, basically," Zeb said.

"The same students who you saw in Thomas fighting every day - here, you don't see them fight at all," said Burton-Sessons, who nailed a perfect math score on his SATs and will attend Columbia on a full scholarship.

"I think what changed and made the students change is they got respect from teachers," he said. "They thought their teachers cared."

That sense of caring, Burton-Sessons said, helped students believe they could succeed. "They have something to look forward to. They have a goal."

Zeb, who received a hefty financial-aid package to attend Penn, agreed.

"I think people really have changed their attitudes and their outlook on life," she said. "Basically, they could see they've been given another chance and should take advantage of it."

Statistics show that's what has happened with the 87 members of the Class of 2010 who will graduate June 18. Not only are 80 registered for college, but nearly two-thirds will attend four-year schools, including Ursinus, Ithaca, Penn State, Temple, and La Salle.

College adviser Debi Durso said the remaining seven seniors planned to attend two-year schools. Six are taking placement tests at Community College of Philadelphia; one plans to enroll at Camden County College in January.

"I have known these kids since eighth grade," said Durso, who taught them English, shepherded them on campus tours, visited their homes, and helped their families fill out financial-aid forms.

"We talked about college when they walked in the door in eighth grade," she said. "As we have gone through the years, I was 98 percent sure they were all going on to college."

Durso, a former district teacher, said: "I feel like we raised them. We showed them there's more out there. But it comes down to them - the determination and passion. . . . They're great kids."

But Debbie Elliott, whose daughter, Courtney, will attend La Salle in the fall, called Mastery-Thomas a "great school" and said she believed it deserved plenty of credit for the students' success.

"Courtney was always a good student, but I think Mastery Charter really helped her," Elliott said. "She's dedicated and really matured here. I couldn't see her anywhere else."




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Contact staff writer Martha Woodall at 215-854-2789 or martha.woodall@phillynews.com.








Find this article at:
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20100523_Turnaround_charter_getting_high_marks_for_college_prep.html

Using the iPod for Reading

iPod, iListen, iRead

The learning landscape is shifting under our feet. It's an exciting and momentous time for technology advances in learning, from the explosion of interest in online courses to free videoconferencing to powerful new devices at lower cost, such as the iPad. Having worked in educational media and technology beginning in the 1970s, I dare say that more change has happened in our field in the last four years than the last 40.

Last fall, I presented our Digital Generation project [1] at a conference in Hangzhou, China, organized by professor Michael Searson from Kean University, a leader in providing teachers-in-training with global perspectives, curricula, and study abroad. There, I learned about a creative use of the iPod for helping young students master reading, writing, and much more. I tell this story at greater length in my upcoming book, Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools (Jossey-Bass, June) [2].

In 2005, Kathy Shirley, technology director for the Escondido Union School District near San Diego, observed a teacher conducting "fluency assessments" of her students, spending a full day in individual sessions with students, marking on worksheets the pace, accuracy, and expression of each student’s reading. The school had to hire a substitute teacher for the day.

Shirley, an Apple Distinguished Educator, had been using an iPod to record her own voice memos. The light bulb went off: Why couldn’t students' readings be recorded on an iPod, on their own time, and reviewed by the teacher, on her own time? More importantly, could the act of students recording and listening to their readings improve their skills? Escondido's majority of 53 percent Latino English-language learners made the search for a better way even more urgent.

In 2006, the iREAD (I Record Educational Audio Digitally) project started as a pilot program in Escondido, with six teachers of English language learners working with low-performing readers, content experts, and IT staff. This year, more than 100 K–8 classrooms are using 1,300 iPods, and the program has expanded to include readers at all levels. Students use the iPods with external microphones to record their reading practice and assessments. The iPod Touch, with its larger screen, Internet access, and applications, enables a better multimedia experience, as students download audiobooks and songs and read along with the text of stories and lyrics.

Teachers are trained to use the iPods, microphones, iTunes, GarageBand for audio production, and other digital tools. Student and teacher recordings are uploaded to iTunes, where teachers create playlists for each student. Students, teachers, and parents can then review progress, creating a powerful learning loop between all three.

The “Missing Mirror” in Language Instruction
As Shirley describes it, ‘‘Voice recording using the iPod provides that instant feedback loop, as students can easily record their fluency practice and listen immediately to the voice recording. It's difficult, especially for struggling readers, to 'step outside themselves' during the moment of reading. They are concentrating so hard at the act of reading that they have no idea what they really sound like. The iPod does something that even the teacher cannot do, provide a means for the student to receive feedback by listening to their own recordings. The iPod is very much like a mirror for students."

In 2008, the Canby, Oregon, district also began experimenting with the program, led by technology director Joe Morelock, also an Apple Distinguished Educator. Canby, a district of nine schools and about 5,000 students, now has about fifty classrooms using iPods of various types and the project has extended into high school, where students are listening to audiobooks and using video cameras to analyze their presentation skills.

Evidence of Student Outcomes
Escondido and Canby classrooms are seeing large gains in the speed of student reading, one part of reading fluency. In a Canby fourth-grade classroom of sixteen students, from the fall to mid-year assessment of reading fluency, when average increase in word count per minute (WCPM) is 12, the average in the iPod classroom was close to 20. (WCPM measures the pace of reading; accuracy is another component of fluency.) Most students achieved more than double the average expected.

In an Escondido fourth-grade class of ten students, average increase was 48 WCPM in just six weeks. At the start of fourth grade, all of the students lagged behind the 120 WCPM goal for third-grade completion. Within the six-week period, more than half of them had caught up and surpassed the goal for fourth-grade completion, making more than a year’s progress in that period.

A pilot study of reading achievement using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills also showed impressive gains. A group of 12 fifth-graders in Escondido using iPod Touches averaged 1.8 years of reading progress in six months, compared with a matched group of students at the same school who averaged .25, a quarter of a year’s increase. Both districts are planning larger-scale studies of reading achievement.

Reading Success Becomes Contagious
I had a chance to visit Central Elementary in Escondido this May and was bowled over by the level of student enthusiasm for using iPod apps for reading, writing, geography, mathematics, and more. In these classrooms, students are leading their own reading. They want to practice their speed, accuracy, and comprehension. The iPod makes personal a process that has been painfully public. No struggling reader likes to have his or her weaknesses exposed in a group, in front of the entire class or their reading circle. The iPod enables more intimate, 1:1 reading instruction between a student and a teacher listening to each other’s voices in audio files.

As the students get excited, teachers get excited, too. Success becomes contagious for everyone involved. As Morelock puts it, ‘‘This is the secret sauce to all of this: teacher motivation. We have heard teacher after teacher say, ‘This has totally transformed my teaching!’ ‘I’m having more fun and being a better teacher.’ ‘I’m never gonna retire.’” One teacher told Shirley, ‘‘Using iPods with microphones has engaged students more than anything I’ve ever experienced! These tools allow even the softest speaker to be heard and motivate even the most reluctant reader.’’ Another said succinctly: ‘‘There’s less of me talking and more of them doing.’’

A classroom set of thirty iPod Touches and a cart costs about $12,000. The iPods can be supplemented with five desktop or laptop computers for students to produce media, such as podcasts. It is a less costly model than the 1:1 laptop classroom and right-sized for elementary students, who can hold the key to their literacy in the palms of their hands.

Resources on iPods in Literacy
Shirley and Morelock have created a Web site and a [3] from these iPod projects, including videos of classroom scenes and teacher interviews.

See Julie Johnson’s third-grade classroom blog [4] from Canby, including how her students downloaded Yoga for Kids podcast and the Pocket Yoga app to relax during test preparation.

The iRead project in Escondido was covered in a May, 2010 story in the local North County Times. [5] The photo shows a student showing me her iPod screen, but it should have been a photo of superintendent Jennifer Walters, who joined the classroom visit that day. Her advocacy for this cutting-edge application of technology has been a critical factor in its success.



This article originally published on 5/17/2010
Edutopia: What Works in Education © 2010 The George Lucas Educational Foundation • All rights reserved.

Positive Trends for our Schools

How Schools Can Achieve Obama's Lofty Education Goals
Three positive trends offer big lessons on making America more educationally competitive by 2020
By Richard Whitmire , Andrew J. Rotherham
Posted May 18, 2010
Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, is coauthor of the recent New America Foundation report, "Pathway to the Baccalaureate." Andrew Rotherham is a partner at Bellwether Education and writes the blog Eduwonk.com.


Finding depressing education news is easy. The recession, combined with the waning of federal stimulus money, is about to trigger hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs—an "education catastrophe," warns Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The layoffs will play out against a background of flat national reading scores and mediocre showings on international education rankings. Looming behind everything: the country's much-debated school reform law, No Child Left Behind, has fallen into disrepute.

None of this can be sugarcoated; yet dwelling on the negatives masks some significant education breakthroughs that promise to pay dividends for years to come. Together they represent the country's best shot at achieving President Obama's ambitious goal of pushing the country back to the top of international education rankings—measured by college graduations by 2020.

These developments include breakthroughs on answering these questions:

How do school districts do more than just talk about effective teaching?

Most parents assume the debate over teacher quality is about "merit pay" or reforming teacher tenure so that during layoffs the best teachers, not just the more senior teachers, keep their jobs. Far more important are the breakthroughs that even allow those debates. Can good teaching be taught and measured? Yes and yes.

Teacher/innovator Doug Lemov put it into a book: Teach Like a Champion. You can see it in action in any of the charter schools he helps oversee at Uncommon Schools. In the District of Columbia a former national Teacher of the Year, who won that award teaching in one of Washington's most challenging neighborhoods, devised an evaluation system that both defines and measures effective teaching.

DC is pushing the debate to the next level—how you produce teachers worthy of retaining them and rewarding them with higher pay. The best news: scores of states seem eager to follow.

How do you build inner city schools that turn out college-ready students?

A few schools do that on a small scale, but in Houston it's being done at scale. At the end of this month, seniors from YES Prep Public Schools, a network of high-performing public charter schools in Houston, will gather at Rice University for "signing day," where they formally commit to the college they will attend.

In most suburban communities, it's typical for students to go to college and those "signing" commitments hardly merit mention. But YES isn't a suburban school. It serves low-income students from Houston, most who will be the first in their families to go to college. Chris Barbic, the founder of YES, estimates that if current trends continue, YES, with just 3,500 students on its seven campuses, will be sending as many students to college as the entire Houston Independent School District. Houston, with more than 200,000 students, is the nation's 7th largest school district.

YES is one of a growing number of outstanding college-prep charter schools from Los Angeles to Boston that are propelling students into higher education from communities where college going is too rare. Many of these students still struggle in college, but for them to get there at all represents an enormous opportunity.

How do you draw more minority students into four-year college programs?

For years, amid rapid demographic changes, foundations and think tanks have implored educators to channel more minority students into college programs, especially those that yield four-year degrees.

At Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), a program called Pathway to the Baccalaureate should serve as a national example for achieving that goal. NOVA-based counselors paid for partly by surrounding K-12 school districts sweep into high-minority high schools and recruit students who never imagined college as a possibility.

What follows are several years of small-detail monitoring on everything from paying for college to developing the right study habits. That monitoring begins in high school and continues through the first two years at the community college. NOVA's partner, George Mason University, awaits these students with a transfer promise pegged to a GPA rate offered only to these students. This program has been around long enough to produce a track record with real numbers—and the numbers look good.

Most encouraging is the fact that NOVA is not alone. Scores of community colleges that once judged their success by enrollment figures are shifting to measuring graduation rates.

Together, these three developments symbolize powerful and positive trends. Trends that in the long run are more powerful than today's bad news. Combined, they represent our best shot at meeting the 2020 goal of making America more educationally competitive.

What are the other psychological problems that can co-exist with Asperger's Disorder?

Asperger's Disorder may not be the only psychological condition affecting a certain individual. In fact, it is frequently together with other problems such as:

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
Depression (Major Depressive Disorder or Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood)
Bipolar Disorder
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder presents with difficulty in focusing (inattention), hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Almost 60-70 % of children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders ( = PDD or Autistic Spectrum Disorders) have severe enough inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness to meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. Technically, if a child is diagnosed with any of the PDD diagnoses (Autistic Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, PDD-NOS or others), a separate ADHD diagnosis cannot be made. However, I believe that it is important to recognize the presence of co-existing ADHD since this syndrome can respond to medication treatment, unlike the core PDD symptoms. When ADHD co-exists with Asperger's Disorder, anger may easily turn to aggression because of the individual's impulsiveness. Methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate, Focalin), dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine, Adderall), atomoxetine (Strattera), bupropion (Wellbutrin) or tricyclic antidepressants (imipramine, nortriptyline and others) may be beneficial. Common complications of untreated ADHD are ODD (see below), depression (losing self esteem due to academic failure and repeated negative feedback and punishment from adults), increased likelihood of drug and alcohol use, breaking traffic rules more frequently and having more accidents, and eventually getting lower-paying jobs for not fulfilling true potential.


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Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)

ODD represents more of a relationship dynamic between a child and the authority figures around her or him, than a disease process itself. Symptoms include argumentativeness with adults, talking back, refusing to follow adults' requests or rules, losing temper, deliberately annoying others, not taking responsibility for one's own actions, and being touchy, angry and resentful all the time. This can happen only at home, or may start at home and may eventually spill over to the school. Most children with ADHD, if untreated, eventually develop ODD because of daily negative feedback and punishment from adults, as a consequence of their impulsive behaviors. It is important to note that depression, in children and adolescents, may present with similar symptoms, rather than the expected symptoms like looking sad and crying frequently. A Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist should be consulted to differentiate the two. There is no medication treatment for ODD. Individual psychotherapy and sometimes family therapy are the best treatment methods. If there is ADHD underlying ODD, it has to be treated with medication for psychotherapies to be effective.

http://www.aspergers.com/aspcomor.htm

What do you know about....?

Asperger's Disorder is a milder variant of Autistic Disorder. Both Asperger's Disorder and Autistic Disorder are in fact subgroups of a larger diagnostic category. This larger category is called either Autistic Spectrum Disorders, mostly in European countries, or Pervasive Developmental Disorders ("PDD"), in the United States. In Asperger's Disorder, affected individuals are characterized by social isolation and eccentric behavior in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication. Though grammatical, their speech may sound peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. Clumsiness may be prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behavior. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest which usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. Some examples are cars, trains, French Literature, door knobs, hinges, cappucino, meteorology, astronomy or history. The name "Asperger" comes from Hans Asperger, an Austrian physician who first described the syndrome in 1944. An excellent translation of Dr. Asperger's original paper is provided by Dr. Uta Frith in her Autism and Asperger Syndrome.

http://www.aspergers.com/aspclin.htm

Improving children's speech

By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
A study released Monday adds to the debate over whether television impairs children's language development.It found that parents and children virtually stop talking to each other when the TV is on, even if they're in the same room.
For every hour in front of the TV, parents spoke 770 fewer words to children, according to a study of 329 children, ages 2 months to 4 years, in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Adults usually speak about 941 words an hour.

Children vocalized less, too, says author Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children's Research Institute. In some cases, parents may have spoken less because they sat a child in front of a TV and left the room, he says. In others, parents simply zoned out themselves while watching TV with a child. Researchers didn't note the content of the TV shows.

Parents may not realize how little they interact with children when a TV is on, Christakis says. A mother may think she's engaged with a baby because they're both on the floor playing blocks. But if a TV is on in the background, the two of them talk much less, he says.

That may help explain earlier studies finding that babies who watch a lot of TV know fewer words, although they catch up to their peers by 16 months, Christakis says. "Babies learn language from hearing it spoken," he says.

Christakis and his colleagues fitted children with digital devices that recorded everything they heard or said one day a month for an average of six months. A speech-recognition program, which could differentiate TV content from human voices, compared the number of words exchanged when televisions were on or off.

Victor Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, describes the latest report as "an excellent, creative study."

It's the seventh study to suggest that TV hurts children's language development, Strasburger says. A March report from Harvard Medical School found that watching TV neither helped nor harmed children's language skills.

Though Christakis acknowledges that there is still some debate about whether watching television is harmful, he says there's no evidence to show that it's helpful. That's why the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for babies under age 2.

"We need to avoid parking babies in front of screens," Strasburger says. "Parents need to realize they need to be the primary entertainment for their babies. Parents are movie stars when their kids are babies. It doesn't last long."

From What to How

Published Online: May 11, 2010
Published in Print: May 12, 2010, as From What to How
Commentary

Common Standards: From What to How
How Common-Core Standards Should Influence Teaching
By Douglas B. Reeves





Will the recently released draft of K-12 standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative provide a degree of coherence in academic expectations for students, teachers, and education systems that has not previously been available in American education? Or will this effort be one more failed reform, distinguished more by enthusiastic presentation than by successful implementation? The answer depends not merely on the standards documents, but also on the degree to which policymakers and leaders are willing to link the clear intent of the standards to the reality of the classroom.

We should first acknowledge that, in a nation committed to “local control” of education, any attempt to draft common standards represents courageous and difficult work. The standards-writers deserve our thanks, if not always our agreement. But while I applaud the rigor and specificity present in much of the standards document, I must challenge what seems to be its central premise: that standards are merely the “what” of education, while the “how” must be left to the discretion of individual schools and teachers.

In the introduction to the English/language arts standards document, for example, the writers declare: “Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the standards” [Page 2]. And they then say, “The standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do but not how teachers should teach” [Page 3]. Such statements undermine what is otherwise a document with a great deal of promise.

Consider the best features of the proposed common-core standards, which include a refreshing emphasis on nonfiction reading and writing at the elementary school level. The document suggests that 65 percent of elementary school writing should be explanatory or persuasive in nature, while most current elementary writing is dominated by fiction, fantasy, poetry, and personal narrative.

The standards also make clear that teachers in social studies and science are responsible for teaching and assessing reading, writing, speaking, and listening as well, a directive that is particularly important at the secondary level. Recent research suggests that while teachers are widely aware of the importance of evidence-based instructional practices in writing, they are not likely to apply them in secondary social studies and science classes.

The standards for grades 6-8 are particularly strong, and will for many schools represent a significant improvement in the preparation of students for high school. If taken seriously, they will lead to dramatic increases in the attention given to the teaching and assessment of reading and writing in these grades. The case for improved quantity and quality of nonfiction writing and reading at this level is supported with an impressive collection of research.

The standards-writers not only make clear the importance of greater rigor in our expectations of what student literacy should be, but also demonstrate convincingly that most students now fail to read and write at the levels suggested by these standards. Indeed, students are rarely asked to read and write with this degree of complexity.

The standards-writers deserve special commendation for their emphasis on kindergarten reading and writing. While I continue to hear the evidence-free argument that it is not “developmentally appropriate” for kindergartners to read and write, the standards document demonstrates with authentic examples that students can rise to the challenge. Writing, or failing to write, by the ages of 5 or 6 is not a reflection of brain development, but a consequence of adult expectations.


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The false “what-how” dichotomy, however, threatens to reduce the standards-writers’ accomplishments to rubble. In their introduction, for example, they also say that “the standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or specify the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to use to monitor and direct their thinking and learning” [Page 2]. They might as well have written, “While the evidence suggests that obesity is a national tragedy with enormous personal and financial costs, we completely support your decision to dive into a smorgasbord of sugared water and junk food.” After all, recommending diet and exercise would be too close to mandating a “process,” something these standards eschew.

Any careful reading of the standards makes clear that process and content are essential components of effective education. The document very clearly does not regard every expression of professional judgment as equally valid. The writers, properly in my view, would require that 4th grade students “produce coherent and clear writing in which the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience” [Page 18].

The document also provides very explicit requirements for persuasive, informative, and narrative writing at each grade level. The expectations for revisions, research, correction, and adherence to conventions all have clear implications for teaching methods and instructional leadership.

With a majority of states having agreed to embrace the common-core standards, this moment is too important to let slip away. Now is not the time to weaken before those who think that “local control” implies a constitutional right of indifference to evidence. Standards take us halfway up the mountain. If we are to reach the summit, then teaching and leadership, not equivocation and indecision, will take us there. n

Douglas B. Reeves is the president of the Leadership and Learning Center, headquartered in Englewood, Colo.

Vol. 29, Issue 31, Pages 32-33










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