1. The most successful schools and teachers in the Clark network significantly
changed their attitudes and skills because deep professional knowledge and
opportunities to share insights and experiences empowered them to do so.
2. Professional development that makes a difference in the classroom is
consistent, ongoing, stretching, and inclusive. That is, teachers plan and
conduct it as essential to their goals for academic performance in their
school.
3. Successful principal leadership moves from management to empowerment
of teachers, but this is a subtle challenge that requires its own set of
critical skills and considerable support for the principals.
4. Efforts to involve low-income parents in urban middle schools must use
a language and actions that convey a commitment by the schools to support
parents and a message that the schools are family-centered.
5. Schools that know how to put standards and substance into the phrase
"student-centered" also are more likely to produce higher student
achievement.
6. As alike as urban districts and distressed urban schools may be, it is
the differences in the structures around them that determine the course
of reform.
7. Assessment policies are changing, and a critical factor in making sure
that the changes do not repeat mistakes of the past is the inclusion of
teachers and principals in the development of new assessments.
8. The influence of teachers' unions on school reform depends greatly on
the extent to which unions adapt to reform agendas or remain inflexible
-- often because they function in a "union town."
9. Urban districts need a consistency of vision and purpose based on high
achievement of all students in order to drive middle grades reform -- or
any systemic reform -- through the maze of competing interests, instability,
and politics.
10. School officials and outside funders need to cooperate on planning and
evaluation of change initiatives with the goal of developing internal support
for successful initiatives after outside support ends.
11. Urban school districts cannot abdicate their responsibility for seriously
troubled schools.
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