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Performance-Driven School Systems Archive

Showing all publications for Performance-Driven School Systems

  • Conditions for Student Success: The Cycle of Continuous Instructional Improvement
    March 2007

    How can school finance better support student performance? This is the question in front of the National Working Group on Funding Student Success, a group convened by the School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. The group's purpose is to craft a vision of performance-oriented school finance and what it takes to get there.

  • Achieving with Data: How High-Performing School Systems Use Data to Improve Instruction for Elementary Students
    February 2007

    This report is the second in a three-part research effort to investigate the prevalence of performance-driven practices in urban school districts across the country. The first study, “Anatomy of School System Improvement: Performance-Driven Practices in Urban School Districts,” analyzed the state of performance-driven practices within 28 leading school districts.

  • Learning Facts: The brave new world of data-informed instruction
    November 2006

    In just the last ten years, goaded by broad and still unsettled cultural shifts, education practices have changed dramatically. Schools are no longer just recording and analyzing inputs – dollars spent, number of days of instruction, numbers of students per teacher – but pushing their data-gathering and analysis efforts into the brave new world of outcomes. Who is dropping out and why? Which students are reading at grade level, and which are not? How are 4th graders doing on fractions and decimals?

  • Cycle of Instructional Improvement: Self-Assessment Tool
    June 2006

    As public school systems work to attain better academic outcomes for all students, an increasing number have found that they must become more performance-driven organizations. The cornerstone of this approach is the strategic use of student performance data and other information as central to what NewSchools Venture Fund calls the "cycle of instructional improvement." To help educators examine their own use of data-driven decision making and begin to implement this cycle, NewSchools has developed this self-assessment tool.

  • NewSchools Performance Roundtable: Reflections and Next Steps
    November 2005

    This paper synthesizes themes from a conversation NewSchools Venture Fund convened in May 2005 about public school systems' shift toward becoming "performance-driven systems." Much like "learning organizations," these systems have the potential to attain and sustain better educational outcomes for all students by constantly questioning the "why" and "how" behind their results, and by learning from their successes and failures as a platform for continuous improvement.

  • Anatomy of School System Improvement: Performance-Driven Practices in Urban School Districts
    May 2005

    With the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund has embarked on a three-year research project tracking the adoption of performance-driven practices in urban school systems.