Bellwether Covid-19 Response Webinar

Yesterday Bellwether hosted a webinar with with four pivotal sector leaders — Dan Domenech, American Association of School Administrators; Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy Charter Schools; Nina Rees, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; and Sonja Santelises, Baltimore City Public Schools,.

They shared challenges, lessons and successes, and discussed what’s next. If you missed you can watch or listen here, closed captioning available.

More via this Ahead of the Heard post. 

Bellwether & Covid-19

A few resources from Bellwether to share.

On Thursday we have a webinar featuring Dan Domenech of AASA, Nina Rees of NACPS, and Eva Moskowitz and Sonja Santelises for on-the-ground district and charter perspectives. Pre-registration required. And it is filling up so don’t delay if you want to join.

Today we released this toolkit for school and non-profit leaders.

And (like everyone else it seems) we have a resource page with a lot of free resources.

Here are a few looks at various issues. I think school districts and charters should consider providing instruction this summer. Hailly Korman thinks there are some empathy lessons bound up in what’s happening. And at our blog Ahead of the Heard you will find a variety of resources on organizational and educational issues that the sector is facing.

Bellwether & COVID-19

We posted this on LinkedIn today.

Like many nonprofits, Bellwether’s operations are impacted by COVID-19. In particular, academic advising, strategic planning, and evaluation work we do inside schools is paused, and we’ve shut down team member travel.

Short term, this means we have unexpected surplus capacity which we’d like to make available, pro bono, to school districts and charter school networks that are figuring out how to address a variety of issues related to operations, strategy and decision-making, state and federal policy guidance, curriculum and instruction, and financial planning.

Across our team of more than 60 full-time professionals, we have former school leaders, nonprofit leaders, media professionals, and experienced strategy consultants. Our team members have worked at the Department of Education, The White House, top-tier management consulting firms, and state education agencies around the country. Three-quarters of our staff have worked in the classroom, some still teach part time now.

To learn more, please email , tell us about your district or network and what you need. We cannot service all requests but will take on as many as possible and farm others out to peers as we are able.

Latest Edu-Reads

As the charter school debate becomes increasingly partisan, Bellwether has a new report on autonomous schools, schools that occupy the middle ground between “traditional” and “charter.”

Brandon Lewis talks with Shaniola Arowolaju, a D.C. native and parent organizer, about how challenging it can be for parents to find the right school for their child.

“So for now, the thousands of minority parents relying on charter schools are on thin political ice, with indifference coming from the Republicans and hostility coming from the now-dominant wing of the Democratic Party.” That’s from Andy Rotherham and Richard Whitmire in The Hill on the deteriorating politics around charter schools.

Beth Hawkins interviews outgoing Louisiana schools chief John White.

Colleges that are part of the American Talent Initiative are on track to meet their collective goal of recruiting 50,000 more low- and middle-income students, but there are signs the gains are slowing. H/t to Goldie Blumenstyk.

The Urban Institute has a fun graphic on who would benefit from free college programs.

Mike Goldstein and Scott McCue on how they took the risk away from people wanting to become teachers: they guaranteed candidates a teaching job, and let students pay back their tuition after they graduated and found a job.

A big new CALDER paper looks at academic mobility. How much does a students’ relative performance in third grade predict how they will perform in later grades? The authors find quite large correlations (aka very little mobility) across six states. Moreover, the districts that see gains tend to help all of their students improve:

We also show that school districts exhibit statistically and economically significant variation in academic mobility. The predominant driver of cross-district variation in total academic mobility is absolute mobility, not relative (within district) mobility. That is, districts differ much more by whether they are effective in raising achievement throughout the entire distributions of their students than they do in their ability to improve lower-performing students’ relative ranks internally. Indeed, we do not find evidence of large differences across districts in relative mobility, which suggests that districts do not, in fact, differentially specialize in educating students at different achievement levels within their distributions (e.g., high versus low achievers).

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Edujob: Digital Marketing Associate for Bellwether Education Partners

Bellwether is seeking a Digital Marketing Associate to support Bellwether’s external relations efforts in a broad array of marketing, communications, and fundraising activities.

We are committed to building a team that reflects the varied backgrounds and experiences of the students we seek to serve. If you know someone who might be interested, please send them our way!

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Thanksgiving Week Edu-Reads

Allison Crean-Davis interviews Diana Cournoyer, the Executive Director of the National Indian Education Association.

Bellwether was part of a group to win the contract for a National Comprehensive Center, with Westat (the lead grantee), RMC Research, and Academic Development. Read more about that work here.

Bellwether also has a new publication out via Pathway 2 Tomorrow highlighting our work on postsecondary access and success. Because higher education is primarily a regional issue, particularly for underserved students, there is a unique opportunity to bring together stakeholders from both the K-12 and postsecondary sides to amplify successes and address common challenges.

I’m behind in my reading, but this David Steiner piece on why rigorous curriculum stays on the shelf is worth your time. It’s hard to do it justice with just one quote, but this was my favorite passage:

…in the United States we have built a system that not only fails to support the sustained use of demanding curriculum—but actively produces powerful disincentives to its use. In what school of education are teachers prepared to teach powerful and demanding works of literature to students who are two or three grade levels below the level required to make real sense of those texts? (I know of none, but would like to be mistaken.) Is there a high-quality ELA curriculum that includes materials for teachers whose students are below grade level? In how many districts are principal evaluation tools supplemented by curriculum-specific rubrics? Beyond the quizzes and curriculum-embedded assessments, how many standalone interim assessments actually measure students’ knowledge of what their curriculum asks them to read? How many summative assessments do the same?

Doug Lemov has a good story about when hands-on learning works, and when it doesn’t.

Is Missouri’s teacher pension plan “good?” That depends on who’s asking the question.

Mike Antonucci contrasts two surveys, one suggesting that 9/10 teachers are planning to leave the profession immediately… and the other suggesting they’re planning to stay until retirement. Which is it? Rather than trying to parse out these survey responses, shouldn’t we just look at revealed preferences instead?

A reminder from Chalkbeat that “public” schools often screen their students: “To get into Columbia Secondary for sixth grade, the school considers state test scores, and students must take a school-created test, have good attendance records, and live or attend elementary school in the surrounding neighborhoods. (Across the city, about a quarter of middle schools similarly set their own competitive entrance criteria.)”

Speaking of charters, kudos to Erica Green and Eliza Shapiro for digging into the racial politics around charters and Democrats. I also appreciated that the authors mostly quoted parents and school leaders and stayed away from pontificating pundits. But, wow, this talking point from Elizabeth Warren’s team is totally off:

In addition to following the same state and federal accountability laws that every other school follows, charters also must compete for students, provide their own facilities, and face the risk of being shut down for poor performance. Do traditional public schools really want to compete on those terms?

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

Edu-Job: Director of Talent Operations at Bellwether Education Partners

Bellwether is hiring! Specifically, we’re looking for someone to become our Director of Talent Operations. From the job description:

The Director of Talent Operations will lead Bellwether’s talent recruitment processes and priorities, providing support for talent development and implementation of new talent processes. This instrumental new role will be a part of our small internal Human Capital team and offers candidates a tremendous opportunity to develop strategic talent management skills as Bellwether grows….

In that context, the Director of Talent Operations’ primary responsibilities and duties will be to support the expansion of current hiring practices while driving the development and implementation of new systems and practices aligned with Bellwether’s talent priorities — most especially, supporting Bellwether’s goal to attract, retain, and develop a diverse, joyful, and inclusive team.

We are committed to building a diverse team and strongly encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. If you know someone who might be interested, please share the job description and encourage them to apply or reach out for more info.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

Latest Edu-Reads

Bellwether has a new website aiming to help district leaders, board members, and other school system leaders learn about what school performance frameworks are and the purposes they serve. It also highlights lessons from five cities that have implemented performance frameworks over multiple years.

Lauren Schwartze writes that, “recent research on the science of learning indicates that these two approaches (grade-level rigor and tailoring education for individual student needs) aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re both necessary and reinforcing qualities of effective learning experiences.”

Marty Lueken shares some bad news on Connecticut teacher pensions: “Across Connecticut, the teacher pension system is not working for teachers, taxpayers or children. And it has the potential to fail current and future retirees if it is not equitably and carefully reformed – soon.”

Marguerite Roza on an under-appreciated aspect of the Chicago teachers strike. Namely, the teachers union wants to take away a policy adopted six years ago that gave school principals some autonomy over their budgets and, instead, move toward more centralized staffing decisions.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman