In the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring the topic of early warning systems and its importance in the school system. This first post tackles the ways in which these tools are designed to advance an equity-based agenda. Guadalupe Guerrero, superintendent of Portland Public Schools (PPS)—the largest and most diverse school district in the State of … Continue reading Why Every School District Needs an Early Warning System
This article was co-written with Julie Ziegler. To continue the conversation, please reach out to them respectively at jharris@illuminateed.com or jziegler@illuminateed.com. When you look around your schools, would you believe that 1 out of every 4 students has experienced at least one traumatic or adverse childhood experience? In fact, 1 out of every 2 people … Continue reading School-Aged Youth & Trauma: How Education Communities Can Help
Recent studies on student engagement self-perception and performance. The extent to which a student is engaged is a robust predictor of his or her ability to learn, get good grades and test scores, retain information and, ultimately, graduate. The 2016 Gallup Student Poll surveyed 900,000 public school students in grades 5-12 in 48 states. The … Continue reading Developing Hope & Resilience for Disengaged Students
Back when I was in jail and probation—serving as an assistant principal for a charter school network based within the system—I saw a lot of students from various backgrounds shuffling through. Since I was the AP, referrals were pretty consistent. The reasons were like how the ol’ saying goes, “If I only had a dime … Continue reading Ditch “The Book” & Use Restorative Principles for Interventions
At a time when many Americans are preoccupied with the “war of words” between presidential candidates, a different news story captured my attention. For days, I read everything that I could about it. And the more I read, the sadder and angrier I became. The story took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it contains powerful … Continue reading How to Identify & Combat Child Abuse
The reality in today’s schools is that students are absent and missing out on opportunities to learn—and it’s happening at an alarming rate. According to research by the U.S. Department of Education, over 6 million students have missed 15 or more days of school in 2013-14. This equates to one in every eight students, or … Continue reading Missing Millions: The Impact of Chronic Absenteeism on Ethnic Minorities
This article was originally written by John LaPlante, Executive Director of ACCESS, on LinkedIn Pulse and is republished with his permission. In Ohio, we have something called the Third Grade Reading Guarantee (TGRG). This is a program through which schools ensure that all third graders have a standard level of reading comprehension. All schools need … Continue reading Use Technology to Manage your Reading Improvement Processes
Earlier this month (April 2016) Illuminate Education partnered with Edweek to give webinar presentation on how schools can implement an Early Warning System (EWS). We were so thrilled with the response that we wanted to give a quick summary of what we discussed in the Webinar. Dr. Chris Balow authored and gave the presentation; below … Continue reading 5 Steps to Building an At-Risk Student Model
All students have different starting points. It’s a fact not lost upon district education leaders, many of whom have devoted their careers to pursuing strategic initiatives for improving student achievement. While they enjoy victories arising from successful student outcomes, instructional leaders yearn to have all students accomplish their goals. They want to see all students … Continue reading Student Early Warning Systems: An Introduction and Best Practices
In the spirit of giving, what better gift to get your teachers than the gift of x-ray vision! Obviously I’m not talking about Superman’s x-ray vision, but the type of x-ray vision that allows your teachers to see things about their students that they had previously been unable to see. As an example of this … Continue reading Create an Early Warning System and Give Your Teachers X-Ray Vision!