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.
Discussion Builders Posters Set: Grades K-1, 2-3, and 4-8
By talking to learn, students also learn how to think. The sentence stems on these colorful posters provide students with a scaffold for voicing their ideas and questions, valuing others’ contributions, and incorporating increasingly sophisticated thinking strategies. Using Discussion Builders, students learn through active participation in classroom discussions. Accompanying quick-guides for teachers explain how to get students talking — and thinking — more conceptually, in any subject. Powerful for English language learners and students of all achievement levels.
Posters and teaching guides scaffold progressively more complex reasoning across the grades. In K-1 the focus is on helping students present, expand, and reflect on important ideas. In grades 2-3, Discussion Builders prompt students to use these skills at more sophisticated levels. The 4-8 poster strengthens students’ complex reasoning, including their abilities to consider counter-examples and conjectures and to justify options.
Order a set of all three posters for $52.00 (shopping cart above), or individually for $18.95 (links below):
K-1, 2-3, or 4-8.
Participate in our one-day Discussion Builders Workshop, which will further enhance your ability to lead effective discussions that boost collaborative and respectful critical thinking among your students.
Doing What Works: Using Student Achievement Data to Support Instructional Decision Making
This free professional development package features everything you need to facilitate a three-hour presentation on using student achievement data to support instructional decision making.
Produced by the Doing What Works (DWW) project at WestEd, this “one-stop-shop” professional development package contains:
- A sample workshop agenda; presentation slides; facilitator’s check list; an optional set of slides about the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) What Works Clearinghouse practice guides and how they are developed; the IES Practice Guide, Using Student Achievement Data to Support Instructional Decision Making; and multimedia files
- Participant handouts and other presentation materials, including a copy of the PowerPoint presentation, visual diagram, flyer, and a presentation checklist
- Transcripts of all the multimedia in the package
- Additional materials including a list of DWW professional development resources, an inventory of all the documents and media on the topic; and an introduction to DWW, narrated by former Project Director Nikola Filby
Additional DWW Professional Development Packages:
Doing What Works: Adolescent Literacy
Available for download only.
This free “one-stop” package contains all the materials you need to conduct six two-hour professional development sessions on improving student literacy in middle and high school.
Produced by the Doing What Works (DWW) project at WestEd, it is packed with effective classroom and intervention practices divided into six modules:
- Module 1: Overview of DWW and Adolescent Literacy
- Module 2: Vocabulary Instruction
- Module 3: Comprehension Strategies
- Module 4: Engaging Text Discussion
- Module 5: Intensive Intervention
- Module 6: Four Effective Adolescent Literacy Practices
You can conduct each module as a standalone workshop or presentation, or you may combine two modules to create a longer session, depending on your audience and the length of time available for the presentation. In addition, Modules 1-5 would work well as a series of professional development sessions held over two or more days at a summer institute. Module 6 is well-suited for an overview of all four practices within the framework of an individual professional development or conference session.
The six modules are appropriate for a range of audiences—professional development and technical assistance providers, principals and reading specialists, teacher leaders or coaches, and classroom teachers. Middle school and high school content area teachers also can benefit from learning about these practices and should be encouraged to participate in staff development sessions.
All of the material—including the PowerPoint presentations, sample agendas, handouts, multimedia and other documents—are contained on one PDF, giving you a “one-stop shop” to the presentation materials.
Additional DWW Professional Development Packages:
- Using Student Achievement Data to Support Instructional Decision Making
- Improving K-3 Reading Comprehension
- Increased Learning Time
- Research-Based Practices for Secondary Schools
- Connecting the Dots
- Research-Based Practices for K-6 Mathematics
- Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers
Discussion Builders Posters Set: Grades K-1, 2-3, and 4-8 (Spanish Version)
By talking to learn, students also learn how to think. The sentence stems on these colorful posters provide students with a scaffold for voicing their ideas and questions, valuing others’ contributions, and incorporating increasingly sophisticated thinking strategies. Using Discussion Builders, students learn through active participation in classroom discussions. Accompanying quick-guides for teachers explain how to get students talking — and thinking — more conceptually, in any subject. Powerful for Spanish-speaking students of all achievement levels.
Posters and teaching guides scaffold progressively more complex reasoning across the grades. In K-1 the focus is on helping students present, expand, and reflect on important ideas. In grades 2-3, Discussion Builders prompt students to use these skills at more sophisticated levels. The 4-8 poster strengthens students’ complex reasoning, including their abilities to consider counter-examples and conjectures and to justify options.
Order a set of all three posters for $52.00 (shopping cart above), or individually for $18.95 (links below):
K-1, 2-3, or 4-8
Participate in our one-day Discussion Builders Workshop, which will further enhance your ability to lead effective discussions that boost collaborative and respectful critical thinking among your students.
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 BenefitÂ
- 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.
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.
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 and Induction Programs That Support New Principals
A well-prepared new principal is essential to the success of an entire school. So why is the principal one of the least supported positions in the building?
In Mentoring and Induction Programs That Support New Principals, mentoring expert Susan Villani addresses this key question and provides a useful, hands-on resource for developing a mentoring or induction program for principals, or for enhancing an existing program.
Through practical examples and enlightening vignettes, Villani offers a close examination of the state of principalship and clearly illustrates the challenges often faced by novice principals.
The book also includes a detailed comparison of principal mentoring and induction programs throughout the United States, and provides tips for encouraging and fostering new principals.