PENNSYLVANIA: Act 45 Program: Quality School Leadership Identification (QSLID) Process

PENNSYLVANIA: Act 45 Program: Quality School Leadership Identification (QSLID) Process

The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) is offering a training opportunity to districts seeking a competency-based approach to hiring principals. Registrants may elect to learn 30 Act 45 hours for participation in the training.

Research tells us that hiring the right principal is critical to school improvement, particularly in the lowest performing schools.  With the right principal in place, student achievement can dramatically advance, and schools can retain effective teachers.  Principal leadership is the second most influential school-level factor impacting student learning; no school has ever turned around without a strong principal leading the way.  Securing the right principal lends itself to consistent leadership. The Quality School Leadership Identification (QSLID) process is an opportunity to create a hiring system that will retain effective school leaders.

PDE and the American Institutes for Research have developed a process for school districts seeking a competency-based approach to hiring principals in turnaround and non-turnaround school contexts. While QSLID was originally designed for the hiring of principals, a parallel process has been designed for the hiring of teachers.  Upon completion of the course, participants will walk away with a complete hiring process and district-specific documents and protocols for both teachers and principals.

This program includes one day of face-to-face training, pre-scheduled webinars, journal/feedback reflections, and documentation of QSLID implementation.

Note dates and locations below:

  • PaTTAN Malvern – March 13, 2018  (Snow date: March 19)
  • Baldwin-Whitehall School District – March 5, 2018  (Snow date: March 27)    

To register: Contact Melanie Novak at melnovak@pa.gov

Registration deadline: February 9, 2018

Questions? Contact Jean Dyszel at c-jdyszel@pa.gov

Using Adolescent Learning Research to Improve High Schools

Using Adolescent Learning Research to Improve High Schools

Today “education is where medicine was in 1910,” stated Dan Leeds, founder of the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance) and current board chairman. Leeds was referring to the pivotal moment in history, after the publication of the Flexner report, when American medical schools began to adhere strictly to the protocols of science in their teaching and research. With modern technological advances and a wider range of research methodologies for studying how humans learn and develop, the field of education likewise now has greater access to research that can guide practitioners and policymakers in how best to design schools to improve student outcomes and close achievement gaps.

But this research must be useable and accessible if researchers hope to influence education decisions. Therefore, the Alliance’s science of adolescent learning initiative focuses on translating and disseminating adolescent learning and development research to inform school improvement policy and practice, especially for secondary schools serving historically underserved students.

As part of this initiative, the Alliance recently gathered together an impressive group of researchers, practitioners, and policy experts to examine these advances in research and discuss how recent findings from the science of adolescent learning might inform high school improvement strategies under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). As states finalize their plans for identifying schools in need of comprehensive or targeted support, school districts are developing processes and strategies for ensuring that they support these schools, and their subgroups of students, using evidence-based strategies…

Read the full article here

The science of adolescent learning is the interdisciplinary study of what happens in and with the brain during learning. To learn more, visit https://all4ed.org/issues/science-of-learning/.

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Robyn Harper is a policy and research associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education.

What Would Trump’s Proposed Cut to Teacher Funding Mean for Schools?

What Would Trump’s Proposed Cut to Teacher Funding Mean for Schools?

President Donald Trump has proposed getting rid of the Title II program, which has been around for more than a decade and aims to help districts and states pay for teacher and principal development, reduce class-size, craft new evaluation systems, and more.

The program, which is officially called the Supporting Effective Instruction State Grant prorgram, or Title II, Part A, is the third largest in the U.S. Department of Education’s budget that goes to K-12 education. Eliminating it would be a really big deal, state, district, and school officials say. Zeroing out Title II could hamper implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act, lead to teacher layoffs, and make it tougher for educators to reach special populations of students, or use technology in their classrooms.

The Trump administration, though, doesn’t see the program as effective. And its predecessor also questioned Title II. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed concerns early on his tenure that the program wasn’t getting much bang for its buck. But overall, he was in favor of tweaking Title II, not ditching it…

Read the full article here. May require an Education Week subscription.