MindTrust - Ed Reform Report 2011

Chapter 1 - The Case for Dramatic Change
1. The urgent need to improve public education in IPS is undeniable. IPS students lag behind their peers in Indianapolis and on state tests, with the gap large in 3rd grade and even larger in 8th grade.1 National studies reveal the district’s high school graduation rate to be among the lowest in the country.2 The most recent results on state tests show that the district is making insufficient progress; six of Indiana’s seven most chronically failing schools belong to IPS. Meanwhile, enrollment in IPS continues to decline as families seek alternatives in private and public charter schools and in surrounding townships.
2. Too Few Students Meet State Standards
3. Too Few Students Graduate from High School
4. Few Failing Schools Improve
5. Failure to Meet the Needs of Parents and Families
6. Failure to Focus Resources Effectively
Chapter 2 - Creating the Conditions for Success
1. The previous chapter underscores the urgency of our challenge. IPS students deserve dramatically better public schools. In light of the evidence, The Mind Trust and the Indiana Department of Education, a major funder of this report, agreed that this study should focus on IPS. Our purpose, however, is not to dwell on the system’s record of failure. Instead, our task is to look to the future, to outline a fresh approach for achieving dramatically better results for students across IPS.
2. First, school leaders should have the ability to establish a clear, focused mission.
  1. The structure of the IPS School Board, however, makes such coherence difficult, if not impossible. As in other urban communities, the IPS board is made up of individuals, each with his or her own priorities, values, and constituencies. And IPS board members are subject to shifting political fortunes, policy constraints imposed by the state and the federal government, and collective bargaining agreements with employee organizations. All these get in the way of creating a clear, focused mission at the school level. For decades, the IPS School Board has been all over the reform landscape, experimenting with multiple “solutions” — parental involvement and middle grades reading in the 1980s; robust business partnerships and enhanced professional development in the 1990s; and freshmen academies, career academies, small high schools, K–8 schools, and 7–12 community schools more recently. The fact that none of these has driven any significant improvement in student learning is a sad and soberi
3. Second, school leaders should have the authority to build a team of capable, committed educators and decide how to use time and other resources.
4. Third, parents and families should have true choice.
5. Fourth, funding should follow students.
6. Fifth, there should be rigorous accountability for results.
7. Sixth, every child should have the best possible start in school.
  1. Daybreak Limited - Lee and Carol Merriweather
8. The Evidence
  1. Successful local schools
    1. Center for Inquiry
    2. IPS Ernie Pyle School
    3. Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School
    4. Herron High School
    5. IPS Merle Sidener Gifted Academy
  2. Nationally, some large public charter school networks show promise
    1. KIPP operates 102 schools in 20 states and Washington, DC, serving 32,000 students, 85% of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and 95% are black or Hispanic.
    2. Ten YES Prep charter campuses operate in Houston
    3. Achievement First (AF) operates 19 schools in Connecticut and New York.
    4. New Orleans and New York City districts offer hope
      1. Changes have been just as sweeping but at a much larger scale in New York City, which has about 1,500 schools and 1.2 million students (see Appendix G). Under the direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein guided the school system as chancellor from 2002 to 2010. The hallmarks of his tenure were to give local principals far more control over staffing, budgets, and programs and to sponsor the creation of hundreds of new schools.
9. Creating the Conditions that Support Great Schools
  1. Chapter 3
10. Why This Matters
  1. Lifelong benefits to IPS students
    1. 58% of students entering 9th grade in IPS in 2006 completed a high school degree within four years. In 2008, the typical high school dropout earned $24,300 annually,
      1. 72% as much as the typical high school graduate
      2. 43% as much as the typical college graduate
    2. Beyond earnings, education improves quality of life. High school graduates are more likely to eat healthily and exercise, and they are less likely to smoke or be obese.
  2. Societal Benefits
    1. Good schools lead to higher home values, which attract valuable businesses and employees
    2. Earning a degree saves taxpayers thousands of dollars in social services and incarceration costs.
    3. young adults with a diploma are more likely to participate in civic life, volunteer, and vote
    4. Volunteerism: Just 9% of high school dropouts report that they have volunteered in their community in 2009, compared to 19% of high school graduates and 43% of college degree holders
    5. And among Americans age 25 to 44, there was a 32 percentage point gap between the voting rates of four-year college graduates and high school graduates in the 2008 presidential election
Chapter 3 - Our Plan
1. The components of a new system of schools described above — flexible, innovative, and relentlessly focused on excellence — is not just a dream. In this section we detail a specific plan based on more than a year’s worth of conversations with national and international experts; careful study of reforms in other cities and countries; detailed analyses of student performance and school finance data; the history of reform in IPS; and input from Indianapolis parents, teachers, and community and business leaders. Our plan would create a system of high-quality schools and a new district structure to support and grow those schools.
  1. Paul Hill, who leads the Center on Reinventing Public Education, an education reform think tank based at the University of Washington.
  2. National research confirms that incremental changes don’t make enough of a difference
  3. In Hill’s vision, the primary role of school districts is to cultivate a diverse portfolio of schools tailored to the needs of particular neighborhoods and groups of students. Districts are open to promising ideas wherever they can find them, and try to engage cultural, educational, nonprofit, and business organizations in their work … . Leaders see their job as searching for new approaches to schooling that can better serve students, especially the disadvantaged, by closing ineffective schools, opening effective ones to take their place, and ensuring that every student within the district boundary has access to a high-performing school.
2. A System of High-Quality Schools with Excellent Teachers for All
  1. 1. A system of Opportunity Schools.
    1. More accountability
    2. Diverse approaches
      1. Stand alone or network of schools
    3. Becoming an opportunity school
      1. Already high-performing IPS schools could become Opportunity Schools.
      2. Already high-performing public charter schools could gain Opportunity School status.
      3. Other existing IPS schools could become Opportunity Schools over time.
      4. New schools could form as Opportunity Schools.
    4. Growing the supply of opportunity schools
      1. Start-up funding for new schools.
      2. Talent pipeline development.
  2. 2. An intense focus on improving existing schools and replacing the worst ones.
    1. Transformation Directors - oversee 6-10 low performing schools
      1. First, they would help as many of their schools as possible improve sufficiently to qualify as Opportunity Schools; that means nurturing a culture of excellence and high expectations among the principals and teachers in their schools, including reconstituting the staff when necessary, significantly ramping up remediation programs, and introducing creative approaches for accelerating achievement.
      2. Second, they would aggressively seek out highly qualified new school leaders and operators to create Opportunity Schools within their buildings.
      3. Third, they would oversee the orderly phaseout of school programs that do not make the grade.
  3. 3. A revamped, much smaller central office.
    1. Role 1: School Authorizer
    2. Role 2: System Coordinator
    3. Optional fee-for-service functions
  4. 4. More funding to schools and classrooms. (Later in the document this is #5)
    1. How funds are allocated currently
    2. How the new system would work
    3. A new budget for IPS — without any additional taxes
    4. the central office would be overhauled, with current functions completely, or mostly, shifted to schools. To reflect the central office’s new role described earlier, four centralized functions — superintendent and executive support, authorizing and accountability, enrollment, and community outreach — would be maintained or enhanced.
    5. More funding allocated to schools
      1. Funding a new, leaner, and more efficient central office
        Community outreach would increase in importance, as a major role of the central office would be to understand the priorities of families and students and to ensure that families and students receive comprehensive information about their wider array of options.
        IN A FORM THAT IS SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND LIMITS CONFUSION
    6. Services tailored to students’ needs
    7. New centrally funded strategic priorities
    8. Arriving at $12,000 per pupil
    9. Unrestricted versus restricted funds
    10. A conservative estimate
  5. 5. Better options for families (Later in the document this is #4).
    1. The introduction of additional school choice requires a new process for informing parents about their options and enrolling students in schools
    2. Great option in your neighborhood... GREAT INDY SCHOOLS
    3. Our plan seeks to both create additional choices and strengthen neighborhoods.
  6. 6. High-quality academic prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds.
    1. To ensure quality of services, providers would only receive funding once they receive accreditation through IPS, giving parents the freedom to choose an excellent prekindergarten program that best fits their child’s needs, public or private
    2. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
  7. 7. IPS a top national magnet for talent.
    1. High per-pupil funding
    2. High per-pupil funding
    3. Maximum flexibility for school operations
    4. Opportunity to open multiple schools
    5. Dedicated start-up funds
    6. Established pipeline of talented educators
Chapter 4 - A Multiyear Transition
Chapter 5 - Local Empowerment Through Mayoral Accountability
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Appendices
Broad Members
Executive Summary
1. Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) Is Broken — with Catastrophic Results for Kids
2. Great Schools Share a Set of Core Conditions that Enable Them to Help All Students Achieve
3. Creating the Conditions for Success
  1. 7 Conditions
4. What Is an Opportunity School?
5. We Need a Careful Transition
6. Everyone Would Benefit
7. Mayoral Accountability: The Best Way Forward
8. Why We Will Succeed

Next up

MindTrust - Ed Reform Report 2011

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by unifyindy about 11 years ago