Commissioner’s Role in Turnaround, Part 2: New Authority Needed
Recently, the Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER) highlighted Massachusetts’ five-tiered Framework for District and School Accountability, and explained why it might be a useful model for Connecticut. Given the importance of a clearly defined and effective intervention framework for Connecticut, we’ve asked Jesse Dixon, the Director of the Office of District and School Turnaround in Massachusetts, to share three main takeaways from Massachusetts’ process and success with their school-turnaround plan and intervention framework.
In 2010, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education began a partnership with nine districts to turn around the Commonwealth’s lowest performing 34 schools. A new law was passed in January that gave flexibilities to superintendents to turn around the schools, but required each school to turn around in three years or face state takeover.
Lowest-Achieving Schools, Part 2: Lessons from Other States
Not long ago, we discussed the need for a framework for intervention in Connecticut. However, as the expression goes, “the Devil is in the details.” Working through the nitty-gritty issues can make building an intervention system for school turnaround appear to be a daunting task. That’s why it’s helpful to look at some of the exciting frameworks and approaches that other states have successfully embraced and to think about how we can learn from their efforts.
Powers of the SBE, Part 2: Framework for Intervention
In our last post, we discussed the State Board of Education’s authority to create a new 5-year plan for the state of Connecticut.
Another power that the Board should be using is the authority to build a system that monitors the performance of all of Connecticut’s districts and schools based on pre-determined academic indicators, identifies which schools and districts are consistently low-achieving, and requires state intervention for those schools and districts. We call this much-needed system a “framework for intervention.”