Succeeding with English Language Learners: Lessons Learned
from the Great City Schools
This report examines the experiences of districts with differing levels
of success at raising academic achievement of English Language
Learners.
Publication date: October 2009
In 2006, the Council received a $2.5 million dollar grant award from the Institute of Education Sciences to establish the Senior Urban Education Research Fellowship program. The fellowship program is designed to facilitate partnerships between large urban school districts and high quality senior researchers to produce rigorous research that is relevant to the specific challenges facing urban school districts. We believe these fellowships will help our member districts improve the extent to which they can leverage research partnerships into useful and practical guidance, and help researchers better understand the context in which they are working so that they produce work that has a maximum impact on the places where it’s needed the most.
The nine senior urban education research fellowships are:
-
Dr. Robert Meyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Accountability and Performance in Secondary Education in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
-
Dr. Catherine Snow, Harvard University. Collaborating with the Boston Public Schools to Develop and Evaluate Word Generation.
-
Dr. Kenji Hakuta, Stanford University. Technology-Supported Tools to Enhance Science Instruction and Learning for English Language Learners in Middle Schools: A Collaborative Project with the San Francisco Unified School District.
-
Dr. Becky Smerdon, Academy for Educational Development. High School Ready? A Study of Middle School Students in the District of Columbia and their Transitions to High School.
-
Dr. John Tyler, Brown University. Using Student Performance Data to Inform Instructional Practice: Lessons from Cincinnati.
-
Dr. James Rosenbaum, Northwestern University. Does Postsecondary Advising Improve Student Motivation and Progress in High School?
-
Dr. Martha Abele Mac Iver, John Hopkins University. Identifying the Early Warning Signals of Dropout Outcomes in the Baltimore City Public Schools.
-
Dr. Geoffery D. Borman, University of Wisconsin. An Evaluation of Professional Learning Communities in St. Paul Public Schools, and Implementation and Evaluation of a School-Based Intervention for Addressing "Stereotype Threat"
Click here for more information
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grant
Improving Standards and Data Use in the Great City Schools
In September 2008, The Council of the Great City Schools received a 3.7 million dollar grant award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) for the project Improving Standards and Data Use in the Great City Schools. The project entails 36-months of intensive and focused research and dissemination designed to answer key questions about state standards and key levers of instructional change inside schools and classrooms. The proposed work is organized around two distinct—but mutually supportive—strands.
Strand 1, NAEP Frameworks and Trends, will investigate urban school achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and examine alignment between NAEP frameworks and relevant state standards in urban districts participating in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA). The study will also examine factors shaping urban NAEP results, including family, school, and economic variables; and it will study the instructional programs in a subset of participating districts to determine why some districts show faster gains than others.
Strand 2, Data Use for Instructional Improvement, will focus on interim assessments and data systems, and the effects of innovative uses of data on the academic progress of urban school students. This strand will conduct a sweep of urban school assessments and the research literature relating to benchmark tests to determine “best practices” in how data are used to inform instruction and target resources. The strand will focus, in particular, on the nature of and manner in which interim assessments are being used; strategies for using them to refine and improve instruction; and the accessibility of data to enable districts to identify course-taking patterns and track student progress from high school through post-secondary education. The project will also produce rigorous quantitative evidence regarding the relationship between student outcomes and specific school and classroom practices with respect to the use of data —a result well beyond that which currently exists in the field.
Together, the two strands will provide critical information to assist urban school districts in their efforts to raise standards and performance, close gaps, increase graduation rates, and improve student preparation for post-secondary education and employment. The Council will be working on this project in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
IES Urban Education Task Force
The Institute for Education Sciences (IES), in consultation with the Council, has established an Urban Education Research Advisory Task Force, consisting of senior scholars in areas critical to urban education reform and practitioners with substantial experience in leadership positions within the Council’s districts. The Council Executive Director and Research Director are “ex officio” members of the task force, with the Executive Director serving as the chair of the committee. The committee will work with IES to establish a research agenda in urban education for IES that is both “rigorous” and “relevant” to the needs and challenges urban school districts face today, help IES design and implement projects, identify and support opportunities for collaboration between researchers and urban educators, and find new ways to advance the use of empirical evidence in urban school reform.
