We provide up to $1.25M in grant funding to our sites over a five-year period to support their collaboratively and locally-defined strategies to close the achievement gaps in their community.
Three Core Components of the Initiative
We believe that developing and strengthening partnerships among local education unions, school districts, and community organizations, is a powerful force for improving student performance and a vehicle for systemic reform. This work highlights the importance of engaging not only the teachers who provide instruction, but the principals who lead buildings, the superintendent who runs the district, the families who send their children to school and the teacher union leaders who negotiate the working contract for public school employees. Together, these groups are shaping learning environments and opportunities for all students to achieve at higher levels.
Our theory of change and corresponding local interventions are based on recent research on effective schools, district redesign, external agent engagement, association capacity, curriculum and instruction, among other related areas. In brief, our work involves:
- District and Local Union Capacity and Collaboration designed to generate a shared understanding of challenges, with frequent and ongoing communication, and an agreed-upon set of strategies to address the challenges.
- Family and Community Partnerships designed to generate support from businesses, nonprofits, foundations, the district, civic authorities, and parents to achieve powerful results.
- District and School Capacity and Coherence designed to increase capacity at the district or system level to ensure school-level success. Districts need to have coherence (as defined by a singular focus on teaching and learning) and alignment of curriculum, assessments, and resources to achieve systemic reform.
Section Resources
- Issue Brief: Parent/Teacher Home Visits: Creating a Bridge between Parents and Teachers as Co-Educators in Springfield, MA and Seattle, WA
- Issue Brief: Peer Assistance and Review: All Teachers on the Road to Instructional Leadership in Columbus (OH) “100% Project Schools” (PDF)
- Pedro Noguera on “Leading New Opportunities to Learn”
- Michael Fullan on “Drivers of Whole System Reform
- Susan Moore Johnson on "peer assistance and review"
- Issue Brief: Unions, Districts, and Communities to the Table
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