Blog

When schools, teachers and community leaders work together, more students succeed. But it isn’t always easy—districts often encounter challenges when trying to find the time and resources to collaborate. And far too often, teachers simply don’t have sufficient time to engage in meaningful professional learning with their peers. That’s why New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) in Connecticut collaborated with the...
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As part of our Districts Rising publications, we sat down with new Boston Public Schools Superintendent Tommy Chang to talk about his vision for the 56,650-student school system. Chang came to BPS after being an instructional superintendent in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has prioritized equity of access for students, transparency in communications and investments in professional learning....
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I stepped into my classroom at Eastern Senior High School, a public school in Washington D.C., for the first time in August 2000. At the time, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) was a mess—student achievement was abysmally low, school buildings were crumbling and under-enrolled, a bloated central office bureaucracy fought any and all reform efforts, and the district churned through new...
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I once heard a math teacher ask the Lieutenant Governor of a state if he arrived on time for a meeting they both were attending. He answered yes. She followed her first question with another: “Did you know how long in advance you needed to leave your home to get here on time?” He told her 50 minutes. “Then you...
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When Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute declared an “accountability design competition” on January 5, 2016, with a submission deadline of January 26 and a 2,000 word count limit, we jumped right in. The competition asked for submissions to design indicators, metrics and school ratings for an elementary school within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) framework of...
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I realized how lucky I was on my first day as a classroom teacher. Walking into I.S. 162, a large comprehensive middle school in the South Bronx, I immediately recognized the halls, knew the principal and could greet my fellow teachers by name. This was the school where I had completed my teacher training just a few months earlier, so...
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As we commemorate the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this month, it’s clear that we have much more work to do to fulfill the dream that he articulated in his famous 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech. In it, Dr. King spoke not only of a day when his children would “not be judged...
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Happy New Year from Education First! We hope you had a restful, joyous and peaceful holiday season. Now that the champagne bottles have been recycled, we are focused on what the future holds for students, educators and school systems in 2016. We are confident that progress can continue to be made in improving our nation’s public schools this year, but...
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I was a first-time principal when I first read my state’s kindergarten assessment policy. As a former kindergarten teacher, I had a lot of ideas about what 5-year-olds need to learn when they start school: how to sit in a circle, how to speak nicely to their friends, and that their teachers care. Unfortunately, my state wanted them to spend...
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In my second year of teaching, a mentor asked me a seemingly simple question: “How do you know what your students have learned?” I showed her my gradebook, which listed the assignments, quizzes and projects my students completed. “I see scores and grades,” she observed, “But how do you know which students have learned how to graph linear equations? Or...
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