Project to recognize ‘high schools of opportunity’ for all students goes national
Last year, a project called Schools of Opportunity was launched as a pilot effort to honor high schools that work hard to offer all students a chance to succeed. Spearheaded by two veteran educators, it was different from other efforts to rate and rank schools through the use of student standardized test scores and data points. Instead, the Schools of Opportunity project sought to identify and recognize public high schools that seek to close opportunity gaps through practices “that build on students’ strengths” — not by inundating them with tests and obsessing on the scores. Seventeen schools were selected, and this blog spotlighted each winner.
Now, the pilot project that was concentrated in Colorado and New York is going national for the 2015-16 school year. Applications are welcome from public high schools in every state; you can find out how to submit one at the website, here, and in the post below.
The people behind the project are Carol Burris and Kevin Welner. Burris is a former New York high school principal who is now executive director of the non-profit Network for Public Education Fund. A frequent contributor to The Answer Sheet, she was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the same organization named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Welner is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education who specializes in educational policy and law. He is director of theNational Education Policy Center at UC Boulder, which produces high-quality peer-reviewed research to inform education policy.
In this post, Burris and Welner talk about taking their project nationwide for the current school year. When the winners are selected in 2016, The Answer Sheet will write about each one.
By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris
It was a relatively simple task to define a “great school” a couple years ago, at least if we listened to politicians and policymakers. It was all about test scores. A school with high scores was better than that school down the road where the scores were less impressive. These scores were also the prized lever for school accountability and improvement, as operationalized through policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
But test-based policies are unsuccessful in driving greater learning, as more and more people have been pointing out. So emerging ideas are now Project to recognize ‘high schools of opportunity’ for all students goes national - The Washington Post:
