As we close out the year, it seems timely to introduce our latest publication out of the State Development Network (SDN), Setting the Bar for School Turnaround: How ambitious, public goals can drive school turnaround.
As you may remember from our Bold and the Bureaucrat report, we identified ten “power levers” that many state education agencies (SEAs) have authority over but do not use to increase the pressure on a turnaround’s outcome as being a positive one. Another way that SEAs can pull a turnaround lever is by setting public goals specific to turnaround, and releasing public reports illustrating progress toward those goals. Our newest report out of the SDN clarifies the most useful metrics that a state can use to report on, and makes simple comparisons to show the importance of 1) setting a grand public goal (e.g. when President Kennedy, fifty-some years ago, declared that we will go to the moon), and 2) tracking progress and finding small wins along the way (e.g. when a cursed baseball team, such as the Cubs, judges progress not by the number of World Series trophies, but by the statistics for each game won).
Read the publication, or join the discussion below.