From the Brink of Closure: Key Factors in One Charter School's Successful Turnaround
Perry Street Preparatory Public Charter School (Perry Street) in Washington, DC, is one of the few charter schools to conduct a comprehensive improvement effort and do so independent of another operator. Instead, Perry Street’s board chose to work with a third-party turnaround partner to initiate, support, and build capacity to sustain change.
Recent results indicate the turnaround has been largely successful. Perry Street moved from being one of DC’s lowest performing schools to one of the highest performing in five years. And an independent evaluation conducted by WestEd showed the turnaround efforts resulted in significant, positive impacts to student achievement compared to similar students at other charters and traditional schools.
Written intentionally for school leaders, board members, and authorizers, this report and the video below share Perry Street’s story of comprehensive improvement and describes the necessary conditions for turnaround success.
Key Takeaways
Turnaround takes time with urgent focus on goals. Turnaround is a multi-year undertaking that requires everyone to work with urgency, dedication, and focused effort in order to make continuous progress toward goals.
Turnaround requires a systemic approach. At the heart of the improvement effort at Perry Street was the transformation of processes and systems, which enabled educators to focus on meeting students’ needs. This required a comprehensive overhaul of the core components of Perry Street: leadership/governance, human resources/talent, instruction, culture, and fiscal/operations.
Turnaround requires building capacities to drive and sustain change. Perry Street collaborated with its partner, TenSquare, to build the capacity of the board, leadership, and staff to operate and sustain the new processes and systems in the ways their students needed.
Data-Driven School Improvement with WestEd's Four Domains CALL System
This archived webinar is the second in a four-part series designed to help school, district, and state administrators implement the Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement, a framework developed by WestEd’s Center on School Turnaround.
Learn about WestEd’s new Four Domains CALL System, an online tool that identifies a school or district’s unique leadership opportunities and challenges.
CALL utilizes a multi-source comprehensive survey to assess core leadership practices distributed across an organization and the results are used to create a targeted action plan that supports professional growth and school effectiveness.
The Four Domains CALL System delivers:
- Domain-specific feedback on your schools’ strengths and opportunities for improvement that will inform planning and monitoring
- A shared understanding of excellence and the required leadership skills and knowledge necessary to achieve improvements
- Data comparisons against national norms and previous school-level CALL administrations
- Tools to measure ongoing progress
Who Will Benefit
- School & District Administrators
- State School Improvement Directors
Presenters
- Kyle Konold, Executive Director, The Delta Academy
- Lenay Dunn, Senior Research Associate, Center on School Turnaround at WestEd
- Mark Blitz, Project Director for Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning, WCEPS
- Joseph Sassone, former Director of Development for School and District Services, Comprehensive School Assistance Program at WestEd
- Bob Rosenfeld, Senior Engagement Manager, Comprehensive School Assistance Program at WestEd
Watch a video about the WestEd Four Domains CALL System.
Learning and Teaching Geometry: Video Cases for Mathematics Professional Development, Grades 6–12
In this robust set of multimedia resources, facilitators will find everything they need to lead a series of professional development sessions on teaching mathematical similarity based on geometric transformations.
In 10 three-hour sessions, participants in the professional development:
- Explore mathematics content
- View, analyze, and discuss video clips of real classrooms
- Compare and contrast issues across video cases
- Make connections to their own instructional practice
The materials feature videos from unstaged classrooms that offer a window into specific and increasingly complex mathematical concepts, student thinking, and pedagogical moves.
Aligned with the most current standards, including the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, the materials engage teachers in learning about similarity, congruence, and transformations and how to teach these key topics.
Learning and Teaching Geometry includes:
- A Facilitator Guide published in print and as an eBook (PDF)
- 10 three-hour sessions (30 hours total of professional learning)
- 27 video clips
- Agendas with detailed notes and mathematical commentary, PowerPoint presentations, embedded assessments, handouts, GeoGebra applets, and more
View these informational videos.
Filling a Need: Professional Development for Charter School Teachers
Teachers and administrators in independent charter schools tend to wear multiple hats and have enormous workloads. Most independent charters are small. Many are geographically isolated. And a good number are struggling financially; just meeting the monthly payroll can be difficult.
All too often, opportunities for high-quality professional development in this context are minimal or nonexistent.
WestEd’s Charter School Teachers Online (CSTO) project is working to advance professional development opportunities for charter school teachers.
Moving professional development online is key to CSTO’s approach to overcoming the geographic and cost constraints of reaching charter school teachers. CSTO builds on an extensive online library of education resources from another WestEd project, Doing What Works (DWW). School districts can access the material free of charge at the DWW website (www.dww.ed.gov).
CSTO is developing and facilitating eight online professional development courses, each spanning four to seven weeks. Five of the courses are designed to give charter school teachers strategies they can use to boost middle and high school students’ reading comprehension.
The courses cover topics ranging from ways to more effectively lead discussions on textbook material and teach new vocabulary in the classrooms, to strategies for teaching to the Common Core State Standards for reading.
Download this article to read more about CSTO.
Growing Into Equity: Professional Learning and Personalization in High-Achieving Schools
What makes a Title I school high achieving? Professional learning and leadership that support personalized instruction makes the difference, as captured in the groundbreaking research of authors Sonia Caus Gleason and WestEd’s Nancy Gerzon.
This illuminating book shows how four outstanding schools make individualized learning a reality for every teacher and student. The common thread is the commitment to equity—every student achieving.
Content includes:
- Guidance on identifying obstacles to equity in schools
- Background that builds a case for personalized learning
- Four case studies that show the values, professional learning practices, leadership, and systems that have helped schools transform learning
- How-to’s and templates for creating a team-based professional development program that expands individualized instruction in every classroom
Discover new approaches for individual, team, and whole school professional learning that support personalized learning, drawn from schools that are leaders in overcoming challenges and creating opportunities.
Learning From Young People About How Safe and Supportive Conditions at Home Can Inform School Climate
With most K–12 students having transitioned back into the classroom after a period of distance learning prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, educators have an opportunity to consider how to students as both experts of their own experiences and essential partners in their own education—a concept known as student voice.
To better understand strengths-based insights about safe, responsive home environments, the national Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety (CISELSS) at WestEd convened students from Education for Change Public Schools in Oakland, California, for a virtual focus group in fall 2021. Education for Change then conducted informal follow-up interviews with students to learn more about their experiences.
This guide describes how CISELSS conducted its focus group, some of the school climate ideas that emerged, and other ways that educators might center student voice in improving school climate, including:
- Partnering with students to create safer, more supportive learning environments in the classroom by removing assumptions about what student experiences were like at home
- Redefining traditional models of teaching and learning to center student voices
- Inviting candid feedback and input from students about both home and school learning conditions
- Co-creating an action plan with students for improving school climate
Watch the video:
Concepts for Care: 20 Essays on Infant/Toddler Development and Learning
Leading experts in infant/toddler development have contributed succinct essays drawn from research, theory, clinical case studies, and carefully documented practice.
Each essay represents current thinking in the field of infant/toddler development and care.
Individually and as a collection, the essays provide a springboard for reflection, discussion, and further exploration, especially for infant/toddler professionals seeking to enhance their programs and for students in the field of early care and education.
Family Engagement in Title I Schools
Family engagement is crucial to school improvement. These three briefs, produced by LRP Publications, draw upon the work and expertise of Maria Paredes, Senior Research Associate at WestEd.
The briefs illustrate how teachers and administrators can:
- Implement a successful, evidence-based academic family-teacher team model
- Create a comprehensive family engagement plan that encourages family-supported student learning
- Have more useful and effective parent-teacher conferences
Paredes created the model family engagement in education system—Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT). This highly structured approach to family engagement has produced remarkable results for students, parents, and teachers.
Mentoring New Teachers Through Collaborative Coaching: Facilitation and Training Guide
Designed for professional developers who work with mentors, the Facilitation and Training Guide can be used to recreate or customize the comprehensive mentoring program developed by WestEd’s Kathy Dunne and Susan Villani.
Activities are organized at two levels: (1) for working directly with mentor teachers and (2) for helping professional developers design their own mentor training programs. Each step-by-step activity includes a statement of purpose, facilitator notes, and all necessary handouts and overheads.
In addition to the hardcopy binder materials, a CD-ROM holds all customizable handouts and agendas as well as complete PowerPoint presentations. The materials in this guide supplement and expand upon the companion book, Mentoring New Teachers Through Collaborative Coaching: Linking Student and Teacher Learning.
Math Pathways & Pitfalls: Early and Whole Number Concepts with Algebra Readiness—Lessons and Teaching Manual, Grades K–1
This volume of Math Pathways & Pitfalls K–8 curriculum helps students tackle stubborn pitfalls head-on and transform them into pathways for learning key standards for grades K–1. The lessons in this book address early and whole number concepts interwoven with algebraic reasoning. In rigorous research studies, Math Pathways & Pitfalls significantly increased achievement for diverse students, including English learners, in all grades tested.
Math Pathways & Pitfalls lessons and instructional strategies:
- Help students master key mathematical standards.
- Include concepts important for algebra readiness.
- Provide students with guided and independent practice.
- Support academic language development.
- Add value to any adopted curriculum.
- Prevent common pitfalls on homework and standardized assessments.
This all-in-one book contains everything a teacher needs to teach Math Pathways & Pitfalls with ease and success, including:
- 20 complete lessons
- Teaching manual
- Videos of Math Pathways & Pitfalls in action
- Black line masters of student handouts, classroom assessments with answer keys, and resources
- Discussion Builders classroom poster
- Teacher professional development tasks, activities, and video footage