The portfolio district model adopted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is often held up as a national model for high school "choice," touted as the best way to reduce pernicious race- and income-based achievement gaps. According to this model, student demographics are “no excuse” for poor performance: teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student success. But this AISR study on college readiness shows that in spite of...
research and policy
This report is the first of a series of lessons learned from the Transatlantic School Innovation Alliance. The goal of this partnership is to improve teaching, learning, and educational leadership by creating a peer network of principals and practitioners in urban secondary schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. The report examines how policy shapes practice in these collaborative networks, which benefit educators by allowing them to share knowledge and best practices with...
At the request of the Nellie Mae Foundation (NMEF), AISR staff examined the growing body of literature on community organizing to understand how this strategy fits into systemic education reform. The research shows that community organizing for school reform has the potential to create equitable changes in schools and districts, develop innovative education solutions that reflect the knowledge of under-served communities, and build the long-term social capital of under-served communities...
The New York Senate recently authorized the City University of New York to create and operate a Parent Training Center for public school parents that will teach them to more effectively participate in school governance and support students’ educational success — reflecting a growing nationwide interest in parent leadership training. In this report, Anne Henderson, senior consultant for community organizing and engagement work at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, describes four...
Over the last decade, the New York City public school system has sought to reform high school education by closing or downsizing large, failing high schools and opening new small high schools in their stead. This report explores whether these reforms altered the distribution of student characteristics across schools by comparing the demographic characteristics of students entering the new small high schools with those of students entering the large high schools that closed and with high...