How do you define and measure effective teaching, especially in high-minority, high-poverty schools? How do you end the intractable achievement and opportunity gap between affluent White students and their low-income counterparts of color? Last March, AISR’s executive director, Warren Simmons, participated in the Civil Rights Research Roundtable on Education, convened to address these questions by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law...
Recent Publications
This brief but frequently ordered booklet has stood the test of time. First published in 1996, A Culture of Quality is a complex meditation on the features of an educational community that has conscientiously developed a collective culture of excellence in an ordinary American public school. Republished in 2011 – with an updated foreword and preface – the educational lessons outlined by author and teacher Ron Berger still resonate today.
In communities around the nation, youth organizing groups are becoming effective and powerful partners in school reform. Youth, as the people who spend each day inside schools and classrooms, have a huge stake in what happens in schools and bring a unique knowledge and perspective to reforms. As the articles in this issue, produced in collaboration with the Alliance for Education Justice, ...
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...
The national Center for Education Organizing brochure describes the work, focus and services provided by the Center.
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...
Allocating budgets to schools based on students instead of staff can create a more equitable and rational allocation of funds among schools with differing needs. VUE 29 Online
Value-added models have become increasingly popular in today’s policy environment as a way to evaluate, reward, and dismiss teachers. These statistical models aim to isolate each teacher’s unique contribution to their students’ educational outcomes based in part on student test scores. But NYU professor Sean Corcoran uses data analysis to argue that value-added models are not precise enough to be useful for high-stakes decision making or professional development. Corcoran cautions...