A strong school culture, understood as the underlying ethical claims and habitual practices of a school, is linked to numerous positive academic and civic outcomes – from short-term assessment performance to long-term civic engagement and educational attainment.
The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy has designed a best-in-class survey that identifies the alignment of a school’s mission with its practices and determines whether a school’s enactment of practices correspond to those we know support academic achievement and civic formation. In elementary schools, administrators, teachers, and parents undertake the survey; in secondary schools, students also participate.
Because COVID-19 necessitated an immediate migration to at-home learning, the Institute designed a related survey for the remote-learning context.
Dr. Ashley Berner and Dr. David Steiner join Ms. Lisa French, Director of Student Engagement and Success in the Office of Academic Content at the Louisiana Department of Education, and Dr. Eric Watts, Director of Instruction and Student Achievement for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, to discuss school culture: its key components, its role in educational outcomes, and its use as an analytical framework for assessment.
Knowledge matters, and research compels us to focus on addressing the “knowledge gap” if we want to close persistent achievement gaps among American students. How do we know when a specific curriculum provides the deep content that students need?
The Knowledge Map™ tool analyzes an ELA curriculum in terms of the knowledge if offers students about the world and the human condition. We conduct this analysis by “mapping” the knowledge domains that are implicit in the selected texts – showing both strengths and omissions across the K-12 curriculum.
The Institute partners with state, district, and school leaders to analyze an ELA curriculum – and the results provide compelling, actionable data used to adopt or amend classroom materials.
The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and our key partner Chiefs for Change created a database to curate the findings and report cross-sections of data by text, grade-level, and knowledge domain.
This resource allows new insights about the knowledge domains and topics that students are exploring in classrooms across the country.
Analysis of curriculum content by grade level
Proximity analysis shows coherence and quality of supporting materials to the anchor text.
The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy partnered with Chiefs for Change to evaluate the research on interventions that work for students in normal times and in the wake of crises such as SARS in Hong Kong or tsunamis in Japan. The result is The Return: How Should Education Leaders Prepare for Reentry and Beyond?
While the current restrictions on student learning will not last forever, the consequences of the crisis are likely to persist well into the future. How can school systems prepare for what will be anything but business as usual?Listen to the podcast:
How can leaders address transportation, social distancing, hybrid and/or staggered learning schedules, and at-risk students and teachers without losing sight of learning goals?
READ MORE
Instead of delaying access to grade-level work for students who’ve fallen behind, we need to accelerate it.
READ MORE
What does acceleration look like in practice? One way to answer this is to look at schools that effectively accelerate their students’ learning, every day, every year.
READ MORE
The American Consortium for Equity in Education, publisher of the "Equity & Access" journal, celebrates and connects the educators, associations, community partners and industry leaders who are working to solve problems and create a more equitable environment for historically underserved pre K-12 students throughout the United States.
