What's Inside:Features Front Page Multigrade Classrooms Mentoring Sexual Minority Youth Making the Most of Service Learning Scoring Rubrics Resource Reviews Keeping it Small Get Engaged Signature Series New CD-ROM for Charter School Leaders Conference Call New Events Listings What's New on the Web www.nwrel.org Order Document Order Form Flashback Pictures from past events Credits Credits
The newsletter of the Executive Director/CEO: Dr. Ethel Simon-McWilliams 101 SW Main Street, Suite 500 NWREL's Web Site address is www.nwrel.org This publication had been funded at least in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Education under contract number ED-01-CO-0013. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. government. |
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2001 | NW REPORT Helping Schools Still Name of the Game: From the time the regional educational laboratories were initiated during President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration in the 1960s, the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland has been the federal government's choice to support educational research and development in this region. In December, the U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) awarded NWREL a new $32 million contract to continue to assist Northwest schools in their improvement efforts through the year 2005. "This award is particularly pleasing to me," noted Dr. Ethel Simon-McWilliams, NWREL Executive Director/CEO, "because once again it is recognition of the valuable and useful work that the Laboratory has been conducting to bring research into practice. Even though there is still much to be accomplished, educators, policymakers, parents, and communities in the Northwest have made great strides in making school success a foundation of our society. We look forward to continuing together this important work." NWREL's plan focuses on working closely with the region's five state education agencies to help schools become high-performing learning communities where all students succeed. "Our mandate is to go into schools with the highest poverty, the highest mobility, and the lowest achievement scores - places where it is the most difficult to sustain consistently high performance," says Dr. Steve Nelson, Director of Planning and Program Development. "The emphasis of the Lab's work under the new contract is to help those most in need improve results for all of their students." Through extensive assessment of educational needs in the region, NWREL identified five critical issues facing Northwest schools today and posed these guiding questions:
A team of staff specialists in each of these five areas will work with schools to address the schools' particular priorities in efforts to increase student achievement. "In the Northwest, there's been a struggle to determine how much difference local context makes on the success of a school-improvement model," says Nelson. "We need to pay attention not only to what research says works, but to local needs, priorities, assets, and conditions of low-performing schools. We can build upon their unique strengths." The new contract awarded by OERI will support the Laboratory in carrying out three interrelated strategies to assist Northwest schools: Regional awareness and outreach activities. NWREL work begins with regionwide awareness, outreach, and assistance activities with the broad school community including practitioners, policymakers, parents, community members, and service providers. Activities will include:
Delivery of research- and development-based services and products. Intensive NWREL service activities will provide practitioners access to best practices, tools, and strategies for educational improvement. Development and testing of new products and services, as well as adaptation of existing resources, will be carried out to fill specific regional needs. The following are services that the Laboratory will provide.
Indepth and long-term research and development services. NWREL will demonstrate strategies for helping schools address critical needs by providing indepth, long-term assistance to 15 selected schools over the entire five-year contract period. This approach will focus the resources of time, dollars, effort, and information to create classrooms that are high-performing learning communities; schools that enable classrooms to perform effectively; and support systems of families, the community, and the school district. Creating high-performing learning communities is about sustaining renewal, but embarking on renewal can seem daunting to beleaguered schools. So, when is a school "ready" to initiate school improvements? Now, says Nelson. "The most challenged, chaotic, and under-performing schools may never be 'ready' unless we help them get there," he says. "We can't afford to wait for them to be ready before we lend our assistance - we can't afford to triage public schools." |
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"The emphasis of the lab's work under the new contract is to help those most in need improve results for all of their students." |
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