Stanford's Gardner Center partners with California schools on new reform plan
Researchers at the Gardner Center will help design a system for eight large urban school districts that examines social and emotional learning, as well as academic performance.
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School culture, student resilience and motivation are among measures researchers from Stanford's John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities will investigate in large California school districts.
Stanford's John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities is helping eight of California's largest school districts to adopt new measures of success – beyond standardized test scores – to improve student learning and close achievement gaps.
The work with the districts comes after each was granted an unprecedented waiver from certain rules in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). It makes the Gardner Center the data and analysis hub for one of the most closely watched school reform efforts in the country.
"The new accountability system that the districts are proposing is hugely important and really path-breaking," said Amy Gerstein, the executive director of the Gardner Center. "It demonstrates a way to address severe inequalities for today's youth in opportunities and achievement. It's an incredible step forward."
The plan, called the School Quality Improvement System, breaks from the traditional model of using standardized tests as the primary factor for evaluating student performance. Instead, it incorporates a multifaceted approach, one that examines students' social and emotional behavior, school climate and academic standards.
1 million children
Researchers at the Gardner Center, which is part of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, will assist in the design and execution of the new accountability system, collecting and analyzing dat