Three urban school districts —Springfield, Mass; Durham, N.C.; and Columbus, Ohio —will receive an equal share of $3.75 million from the foundation of the National Education Association to improve instruction, close achievement gaps, and stimulate parental involvement, the body announced this week.
That additional funding is the first major scaling up of the foundation’s 6-year old, $6 million Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.
Specific details of the new districts’ plans differ, but they share common elements, including setting up teams of teachers and administrators in selected schools to review student-achievement data, encouraging teachers to visit students’ homes, and establishing joint labor-management panels to oversee the work.
“The three sites we have picked have shown district capacity to collect data and to look at data in ways that can drive instructional change,” said William Miles, the program director for the NEA Foundation. “We think a kind of rut districts get into is in looking into the same data and drawing the same conclusions from that data. If you put a collaborative process in place, and you ask questions about the sources and analysis of data, you’ll start to see the problem differently, in ways that will move you to some different solutions.”