Research you can use“The political culture of high-stakes testing is undermining longer-term, more innovative efforts,” write Andrew Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, in the current issue of Ed Leadership, (“The Fourth Way of Change”).
They cite a recent report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform which, “provides valuable new evidence of the power of bottom-up reforms and community organizing for raising pupil achievement, even in the face of top-down accountability systems.”
The research team studied seven urban districts and targeted schools that were working closely with community-based organizations and found that “community organizing is correlated with higher levels of teacher-parent trust, sense of school community and safety, achievement-oriented culture, and parent involvement in the school.”
Joe Nathan, who’s been a leader in pushing bottom-up reforms in several urban school districts, posted this piece on the Small Schools Group listserv yesterday.
A Univ. of Missouri study is just the latest to find higher high school dropout rates associated with large school size. More interesting was the finding that eliminating middle school, having elementary schools K-6, while creating small high schools that spanned grades 7-12, had the most powerful effect on reducing dropout rates.
Thanks Joe. You can join the group here.
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