New Report: Lessons from Leading Edge Small High Schools
This new Education Research Strategies report, Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small High Schools, illustrates how nine high performing, small urban high schools across the U.S. are thinking about and organizing their resources strategically to best meet their students' most pressing needs. Through interviews and reviews of class schedules, staffing strategies, budgets, and more, the report provides a detailed look at how leaders in these Leading Edge Schools carefully and purposefully think about how they use every staff member, each moment of the school day, and every dollar to support student learning.
The high-performing schools in the study -- all schools with flexibility over their resources -- proactively manage people, time, and money, and demonstrate that it's not just how much money is spent that impacts student learning, but how well resources are used. The report's co-author, Regis Shield, states, "Creating small schools is about so much more than smallness...It's about how schools take advantage of size and rethink the high school experience for urban students."
Report's findings include:
Principals carefully select teaching staff to meet high standards and fit specific school design needs.
Students, on average, spend 20% more time in school each day and 233 more days over four years on core academic compared to their peers in traditional high schools.
Teachers devote five times more hours to collaborating and professional development than local districts require.
For more information about this Education Research Strategies report, click on the URL link listed below.
Related Resources from SchoolsMovingUp: SchoolsMovingUp's Reading Room section provides articles, books, and abstracts offering practical ideas and models for school improvement. For easy reference, resources are organized by major topics. For related information on school improvement and using data to drive instruction, go to the Secondary section of SchoolsMovingUp's Reading Room.
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