"An absolute MUST-READ for school leaders who need to generate school improvement immediately! This book will help you make your school′s turnaround a success." —Bruce Haddix, Principal Center Grove Elementary School, Greenwood, IN "The authors go to the heart of school improvement by addressing the critical need to elevate learning for all students through the use of formative data and evaluation." —Jim Lentz, Superintendent USD 402 Augusta Public Schools, KS Transform your school with research-based tools! If you want to dramatically improve your school′s performance in a short time, this book is for you. Using formative evaluation, The TurnAround ToolKit offers educators a nine-step method based on data-driven continuous improvement processes. Experts and experienced practitioners Lynn Winters and Joan Herman frame these steps within three overarching "turnaround tasks" that begin with realigning systems, progress to integrating data to create the turnaround plan, and, finally, set the stage for ongoing plan revision. Collaboration and rigorous reflection are interwoven through all the steps. The authors clearly explain how to use data to strategically choose, implement, and monitor school interventions. Included are proven methods for: Improving school and student achievement Meeting accountability targets Increasing your school′s competitive edge and reputation Building a solid system for ongoing school improvement This comprehensive resource has it all—a clear step-by-step procedure, tools for implementing each step, pocket summaries for each chapter, and leadership guides to walk you through the process.

This book provides, for Australia, an independent analysis of major issues facing its educational evaluation and assessment framework, current policy initiatives, and possible future approaches. It shows how student assessment, teacher appraisal, school evaluation and system evaluation can bring about real gains in performance across Australia's school system.

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CRESST conducted a multi-year evaluation of a major school reform project at Alain Leroy Locke High School, historically one of California's lowest performing secondary schools. Beginning in 2007, Locke High School transitioned into a set of smaller, Green Dot Charter High Schools, subsequently referred to as Green Dot Locke (GDL) in this supplemental report. This report extended the previous report, which tracked the first and second cohorts of 9th-graders who entered GDL in fall 2007 and 2008 respectively thru the 2010-11 school year, by bringing the second cohort of students to graduation. The CRESST evaluation, employing a rigorous quasi-experimental design with propensity score matching, found statistically significant, positive effects for the GDL transformation including improved achievement, school persistence, graduation, and completion of college preparatory courses. Classification of key college-prep courses based on Green Dot and LAUSD course titles is appended. (Contains 7 tables, 8 figures and 10 footnotes.).

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) as one strategy to support teachers' and students' transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts. This report provides an early look at the implementation of LDC in sixth-grade Advanced Reading classes in a large Florida district, and the effectiveness of the intervention in this setting. The study found that teachers understood LDC and implemented it with fidelity and that curriculum modules were well crafted. Teachers also generally reported positive attitudes about the effectiveness of LDC and its usefulness as a tool for teaching CCSS skills. Although implementation results were highly positive, quasi-experimental analyses employing matched control group and regression discontinuity designs found no evidence of an impact of LDC on student performance on state reading or district writing assessments. Furthermore, students generally performed at basic levels on assessments designed to align with the intervention, suggesting the challenge of meeting CCSS expectations. Exploratory analyses suggest that LDC may have been most effective for higher achieving students. However understandable, the findings thus suggest that, in the absence of additional scaffolding and supports for low-achieving students, LDC may be gap enhancing. Two appendices are included: (1) LDC Instruments and Rubrics; and (2) Summary Report: Developing an Assignment Measure to Assess Quality of LDC Modules (Abby Reisman, Joan Herman, Rebecca Luskin, and Scott Epstein).