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The "statewide system of support," a feature of Congress's 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provided an organizational framework for a "managerial" approach to school improvement that was accelerated in No Child Left Behind (2001). When Congress temporarily flooded states with economic recovery money in 2010, the surge of resources fed a reform zeal and "entrepreneurial" attitude that systems of support helped contain. When the flow of money subsided, patience with federal imposition withered, and frustration with languid academic outcomes mounted, ESEA was reauthorized. This time it was called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, and the system of support was no longer named. The structure of a system of support, however, proved useful for states that were now more independently "strategic" in how they guided and assisted their districts and schools. As programs, projects, and initiatives within state departments of education rise and fall with shifts in legislative emphasis and educator favor, a systems approach to school improvement provides coherence, economy, and strategic discipline. This report traces the history of systems of support and looks for overarching themes in how states addressed the improvement of their schools. [The Systems Development and Improvement Center at the University of Cincinnati sponsored this work.]

In education, the details are the daily practices in every classroom and every office, what the teachers, leaders, and support staff do in their roles to pursue the school's goals. A school's goals express the collective desires for each of its students, what the students know, what they are able to do, how they behave, and how they manage their own learning. The ultimate goal in school improvement is for the people associated with the school to drive its continuous improvement for the sake of their children and students. They do this by sharpening their practice and honing each specific practice every day. While some need to solve their problems alone, a school is surrounded by other people which is an advantage, and theirs, if they adopt an effective process to assist each other in sharpening their practices. This is called a practice-focused collaboration. This report describes what is a practice-focused collaboration.

Strategic Performance Management (SPM) is a multistep process that guides an organization's leadership in designing and revising a system of strategic performance management. Communication is key to the success of any change initiative. SPM provides a logically coherent process for linking strategic planning with performance management, ultimately engaging every person in a state education agency (SEA), local education agency (LEA), or similar entity in performance-guided, satisfying work connected to the agency's mission. A Communication Lens is applied to SPM to strengthen its implementation and success. This report delivers a step-by-step guide to SPM. The guide includes a Strategic Communication Lens that signals opportunities to engage in communication activities related to the SPM process.

Strategic planning and performance management are not new concepts; however, education agencies and other nonprofit organizations have struggled to embrace and use the concepts, especially in unison. The strategic performance management (SPM) process provides a mechanism to bring performance management to state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and even schools, individually or through a network (see Layland & Redding, 2017). The experience of the Building State Capacity and Productivity (BSCP) Center and its partner Regional Comprehensive Centers over the past four years has laid a strong foundation to advance SPM for education agencies. This report starts with a summary of the BSCP Center's work with SEAs, districts, and schools. The authors then share successes and lessons learned, and close with suggestions on the future of SPM.

Teachers are accustomed to gathering and analyzing data that show what a student knows, has learned, and has not yet learned. With this information, aggregated for the class, the teacher may alter her lesson plans to accelerate her pace or slow down to reteach. She may make notes to alter the lesson design for the next time she teaches the lesson. A teacher intent upon personalizing her instruction uses the data to adjust the assignments, supports, and expectations for each student based on that student's individual data. But without appropriate measures and careful analysis, data that show what a student knows do not tell much about how a student learns. To build more capable learners, the teacher must examine her students' learning habits and know how they learn and why they invest effort in learning. The learning challenge (goal, objective, task) is to achieve mastery of specified knowledge and skill under given conditions. To gauge the learner's capacity to achieve mastery, the strength of the learning habits is key, and the learning habits' strength is derived from the depth and vitality of the personal competencies and their repertoires. Fluency comes from the relative ease and quickness--the automaticity--upon which learning habits are exercised. In this brief, when considering of learning habits, the authors stress that the traces of how the student learns are also important as the teacher personalizes learning and creates opportunities for each student to personalize her or his own learning. [This topic brief is one in a series on personalized learning prepared for Conversations with Innovators, 2018.]

This topic brief is one in a series on personalized learning prepared for Conversations with Innovators, 2018. Personalization refers to a teacher's relationships with students and their families and the use of multiple instructional modes to scaffold each student's learning and enhance the student's personal competencies. Personalized learning varies the time, place, and pace of learning for each student, enlists the student in the creation of learning pathways, and utilizes technology to manage and document the learning process and access rich sources of information. On the Center on Innovation in Learning (CIL)'s graphic model of personalized learning, instructional design forms the foundation of a house, and the floors, walls, and roof depict other elements of the CIL's conceptual model. Why is "instructional design" pictured as the foundation of personalization? For this simple reason: Learning cannot be personalized without being explicitly planned by the teacher and thoughtfully integrated into the teacher's instructional scheme. This report discusses how instructional design relates to personalized learning.

In recent years, rapid school improvement--known most commonly as school turnaround--has emerged as the chief focus of dramatic and systemic efforts aimed at giving students better schools. To assist states, districts, and schools in leading or managing these efforts, in 2017 the Center on School Turnaround at WestEd developed "Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement: A Systems Framework" (ED584107). That framework identifies four areas of focus that research and experience point to as central to rapid and significant improvement: "turnaround leadership," "talent development," "instructional transformation," and "culture shift." Within each domain, the framework also identifies three critical practices for taking action. The intent was to organize and frame the field's learning about rapid school improvement efforts and how improvement decisions made at any one level could have a lasting impact across all levels of a system comprising the state education agency (SEA), the local education agency (LEA), and the individual school. This subsequent document, which is intended to facilitate educators' ability to take and track action within each domain, provides the specificity of indicators for each practice identified in the framework. An indicator of effective practice is what Redding (2013) calls a concrete behavioral expression of a particular professional practice that research has shown to contribute to student learning. The indicators presented in this document are expressed in plain language so school, district, and state teams can identify with greater certainty whether a relevant practice from the four domains is standard and routinely operational or whether more work is needed. [For other reports in the Center on School Turnaround Four Domains Series, see ED584125 and ED584115.]

In order to be successful in the 21st century, students will need to master an expanded set of competencies that extends beyond discrete academic standards. Competency-based education (CBE) is an educational approach that focuses on mastery of these competencies -- rather than seat time -- as a measure of student learning. This approach is being adopted by a growing number of educators focused on ensuring students graduate college and career ready. States engaged in CBE initiatives need to ensure that their efforts do not inadvertently promote "shallow" learning by equating "competency" only with the mastery of academic content. True competence is deeper, broader and more personal. It includes academics, but it also includes a wide range of other cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, and dispositions that higher education institutions and employers value and demand. This brief from the CCRS Center, the Great Lakes and Midwest Regional Deeper Learning Initiative, and the Center on Innovations in Learning explores how states and districts can define learner competencies that reflect the full range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for students to achieve college and career readiness. [This report was also produced by the Great Lakes & Midwest Regional Deeper Learning Initiative at American Institutes for Research.]

The pivot point for educational change is now firmly placed with the district, rebalancing the position of the state and the school relative to the local education agency (LEA). The state education agency (SEA) has been shifting its emphasis for decades, from a compliance-focused authority to a change agent equipped with systems, processes, training, and support to heighten the progress of the local district and its schools. A strategic approach to performance management fits neatly in this new organizational environment. Ideal for organizing people and their work in one entity (SEA, LEA, or school), strategic performance management is equally suited to a multi-organization system where interlaced data and responsive supports are critical. A state system of support is such a system. The publication is presented in four parts: (1) Casting a Responsive Net; (2) Synopsis of the Modules and Steps for an SEA, LEA, or School to Implement SPM; (3) Interlaced Data and Responsive Supports; and (4) Best Practice, Productivity, and Innovation. With the SPM approach, each entity in the educational network claims its due share of autonomy, determining its organizational goals, strategies, performance measures, and actions. These core elements of SPM are structured in a way that implementation and performance data can flow between district and school and between both and the state, making possible responsive supports. In a multi-organizational application of SPM, the state agency itself adheres to the same principles of continuous improvement as districts and schools. The SPM processes generate useful, timely data to guide decision-making and course correction within each organization and across them. In this proposal, a networked application of SPM sharpens each organization's unique direction, enhancing that organization's productivity in pursuing its own goals. Two appendixes are included: (1) Ways to Identify Sound (Best) Practice; and (2) Summary of Recommended Study Criteria for Each Evidence Level.

The Center on School Turnaround at WestEd has developed a framework to assist states, districts, and schools in leading and managing rapid improvement efforts. The framework shares, in practical language, the critical practices of successful school turnaround in four domains, or areas of focus, that research and experience suggest are central to rapid and significant improvement: turnaround leadership, talent development, instructional transformation, and culture shift. At a more fine-grained level, the framework then offers examples of how each practice would be put into action at each level of the system. [Contributing writers were Coby V. Meyers, Sam Redding, Dallas Hambrick Hitt, Carlas McCauley, Lenay Dunn, Katy Chapman, Eric Ambroso, and Min Chen-Gaddini. For other reports in the Center on School Turnaround Four Domains Series, see ED584111, ED584125, and ED584115.]

For decades, the regulations attached to federal education funds have shaped the forms and functions of state education agencies (SEAs), especially as state funding for these agencies has stagnated or diminished. In fact, the relationship between the SEA and the state's districts and schools has been colored by the strong tint of federal influence. How will states now repurpose their education agencies in this era of devolved control? How will SEAs step back from the grinding demands of daily government activity, stave off the always-blazing fires of education politics, and with ample time and collective intelligence, reshape their organizations and reset their goals and strategies? How will they reconceive their relationships with their districts, schools, and communities? How will these agencies manage their own personnel in different ways as the nature of their work changes? Recognizing that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) would open opportunities for new thinking about the role of the state in education, the Building State Capacity and Productivity (BSCP) Center--one of seven national content centers supported under the U.S. Department of Education's Comprehensive Centers program--developed a strategic performance management (SPM) technical assistance process to assist SEA leadership in redefining their agency's direction, creating an organizational structure to carry out that direction, and putting in place a performance management system to encourage productivity and innovation. The process brings "strategic planning" together with "performance management" to build a cohesive system to engage people in performance-focused work, report on progress, adjust course based on results, and seek better ways to carry out the agency's mission. With a facilitation manual hot off the press, two BSCP Center consultants began working with the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) in September of 2015, just ahead of ESSA's passage. Two consultants from the South Central Comprehensive Center (SCCC) joined the BSCP Center personnel, meeting for two days in Little Rock each month. The first day, the four consultants and ADE Chief of Staff (designated as Chief Performance Officer for this project) nailed down the agenda for the following day's mental calisthenics with the ADE Commissioner and 15-member leadership team. In January 2016, the BSCP Center's consultants launched the same SPM process with the Virgin Islands Department of Education (VIDE), assisted by the Florida & Islands Comprehensive Center (FLICC), meeting with the VIDE team for three days each month. In both Arkansas and the Virgin Islands, the days with the BSCP and regional center consultants were matched by meetings and work between these sessions. Part of that work was the methodical vetting of the emerging strategic direction with internal and external constituencies, getting feedback, and making adjustments. Strategic Performance Management process is presented in this report.

The promise of personalized learning excites many educators, and schools are wondering how best to introduce it and how they know when they have achieved it. Rather than thinking of personalized learning as an "it" (i.e., a program that is either present or not), we might think of it as an approach to teaching and learning that has many expressions. The authors believe the transformation to personalized learning comes about through innovation, or more specifically a cycle of innovation that is a companion to continuous improvement. In this paper, the authors posit that "innovation science" is the mechanism by which planned change occurs. The interplay between innovation and improvement in organizational culture, the effect of capacity within a culture, and the use of technology and tools to support innovation are discussed. Innovation science can help state education agencies (SEAs), districts, and schools catalyze innovation, identify or create tools for change, conduct transition "experiments," and enable educators to develop competences in innovation. The steps on how and whether to introduce an element of personalized learning into routine instructional planning are listed. Appendix A provides an example mini-study illustrating the innovation science approach. Appendix B provides a worksheet for independent application of the method.

A State Education Agency (SEA), whether in a large state or small, is responsible for a complex education system, responsive to a host of stakeholders, and charged with advocating for a multitude of students of all ages attending schools of every description. Much of what an SEA is tasked with accomplishing is set by external entities, from the federal government to the state legislature, state board, and governor's office. Other responsibilities of the SEA arise from SEA personnel's estimation of what is needed by districts and schools to best serve students. Each SEA leader struggles to find the right balance in their attention between competent execution of responsibilities that are externally determined and visionary leadership. All of these considerations come together in the work that must be performed by the many people in the agency. Strategic Performance Management (SPM) is a way to mix the injection of vision with the routine fulfillment of duties in a dynamic organization in which innovation to meet and exceed expectations thrives. The SPM process requires a considerable amount of time from busy people, but this time devoted to organizing the people and their work returns efficiencies in time saved down the road. SPM engages everyone in the agency in a process that draws on the expertise of each person and amplifies the benefits of that individual's competency to the organization. The greatest investment in time to move the SEA to performance management is in the beginning to set the purpose and direction for the agency. Often, much of this work on vision, mission, values, and goals has been done before, but a reconsideration of each of these elements is worthwhile. It is less likely that the agency has conducted a thorough examination of its functions and structures before organizing people to most productively do their work. SPM includes processes for functional and structural analysis that lead to more enlightened personnel decisions. Finally, SPM puts in place an ongoing process of units, collaborating teams, and coordinating teams efficiently managing the work and finding better ways to achieve organizational ends. The time taken for these groups to "work on the work" is valuable time that keeps the work on track and aimed at the most significant outcomes. This document describes the key features of SPM and provides a synopsis of the modules and steps. Appendices include: (1) Strategic Performance Management Self-Assessment; and (2) Performance Cycle Reporting. A glossary of terms is also provided.

This issue in the "Connect" series is a field report that discusses how a student's personal competencies--cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and social/emotional--propel learning and other forms of goal attainment. These personal competencies are personal to the individual in their shape, size, and effect, but they are enhanced by families, teachers, youth groups, and other venues that intentionally build them. The challenge for schools is how to reach each student to ensure that he or she continues constructing this underlying architecture of personal competencies so that school learning is facilitated. Four practice guides that can enhance personal competencies are listed in this report: "Through the Student's Eyes"; "The Something Other"; "Personal Competencies in Personalized Learning"; and "Personal Competency: A Framework."

Parents seek for their children "something other" than what they usually expect them to acquire through the regular school program, and they turn to extracurricular activities and out-of-school experiences to find it. Teachers know that each student brings to a learning task a something other--certain attributes that affect how the student responds to the challenge. In this paper, the "something other" is the constellation of four personal competencies--cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and social/emotional--and the learning habits that flow from them.

A chief purpose of schooling is for students to master the knowledge and skills contained in the curriculum. Schools, however, can also intentionally build personal competencies that are necessary for students' success in school, the purposeful navigation of life's challenges, and the pursuit of personal interests and ambitions. A personal competency is an ever-evolving accumulation of related capabilities that facilitate learning and other forms of goal attainment. Four personal competencies are particularly salient: cognitive competency, metacognitive competency, motivational competency, and social/emotional competency. These personal competencies can be enhanced through instruction and by example, as part of the academic curriculum, in extracurricular programs, and through engagement of families. They include their own specific clusters of knowledge and skills as well as values, attitudes, and learning habits (patterns of behavior). An expanded goal for education includes intentional enhancement of personal competencies as well as mastery of the curriculum's specific knowledge and skills. In asserting a higher profile for personal competencies in goals for education, a personal competency framework is in order. This document defines key components of a personal competency framework, then goes on to propose and detail six elements of a Personal Competency framework. They are: (1) Personal Competencies (Cognitive, Metacognitive, Motivational, Social/Emotional); (2) Learning Habits; (3) Mastery; (4) Competency Enhancement; (5) Competency Reinforcement; and (6) Contexts. Learning in school is a matter of goal attainment-the pursuit of myriad learning tasks in order to achieve mastery of the curriculum's knowledge and skills. As with other forms of goal attainment, school learning requires the integrated exercise of four personal competencies: cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and social/emotional. As the personal competencies are routinely engaged in learning, they form patterns of behavior that students set in motion with each new learning challenge. The personal competencies are malleable, and they are enhanced most effectively when given focus in the curriculum, school culture, and instructional practices. A glossary is included.

Personal competencies--cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and social/emotional--are applied by students in learning (mastery of knowledge and skills). These competencies are both acquired through learning and applied in the learning process. Personalized learning--a promising approach to education made practical by advances in technology--magnifies the importance of personal competencies. Underlying the optimism about personalized learning is the belief that a student's desire to learn and effectiveness in learning are enhanced when the learning is personalized, meaning that the student is given greater choice in selecting topics, greater control over the learning environment and learning strategies, greater access to learning resources, and frequent feedback about learning progress. Placing the student in a more prominent role in learning only magnifies the importance of personal competencies. This report examines ways that personal competencies can be strengthened through school community, school culture, and the classroom. Templates for enhancing personal competencies in the design of the school's contexts are included in this report.

The purpose of the state education agency (SEA) is to focus the entire education system on helping students become capable in college and career in an increasingly complex world. One of the most vexing problems facing SEAs today is how to meet increasing demands for performance while adjusting to significant resource reductions. Meeting that demand is complicated, because SEAs sit at the center of a sprawling array of institutions and organizations that each have a role in educating students. Meeting the demand requires that an SEA not only become more effective and productive in its own work, but that it will stimulate the same in local education agencies and other organizations that provide education services. This paper addresses one aspect of that challenge--creating an organizational structure that fosters a coherent and powerful system that continuously improves outcomes. The discussion of organizational function and structure also provides a framework for establishing a performance management system for SEAs.

The role of state education agencies (SEAs) in leading change to improve student learning has been evolving over several decades. The 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2013) introduced the "statewide system of support" as a framework for guiding the state's role in district and school oversight and assistance. This definition evolved into the more strategic and comprehensive System of Recognition, Accountability and Support (SRAS), which identifies and coordinates key policy levers states have for supporting low-performing districts and schools. Managing the SRAS for performance will not be business as usual. States will need to be deliberate in: (1) Strategically mobilizing all of their tools, including: (a) Building systemic and local capacity for change; (b) Creating opportunity for local agencies to pursue new strategies; (c) Offering incentives to improve; and (d) Intervening in the hardest cases; (2) Differentiating the application of specific tools to deal with schools' and districts' varied performance challenges and trajectories; (3) Including school districts as both partners and targets of reform; and (4) Continually assessing their own efforts and identifying ways to improve their system to more effectively support higher student achievement. [This chapter was published in: "The SEA of the Future: Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Improvement. Volume 1," Building State Capacity and Productivity Center, 2013, pp. 9-18. See ED562516.]

Personalized learning's basic premise--that instruction should be tailored for each student and that the student should be the prime actor in directing learning. New technology makes possible ways to teach and learn that were unfathomable only a short time ago. Technology is not and should not be the whole of personalized learning lest it fail as an antidote to the tensions in education. To succeed, personalized learning will have to choose its technology judiciously and adhere to sound principles for how students learn. This report presents what exactly personalized learning is, and the role technology plays in personalized learning. [This chapter was published in: "Handbook on Innovations in Learning," edited by M. Murphy et al., Center on Innovations in Learning, Temple University; Information Age Publishing, 2013, pp. 113-130.]

The research reviewed in this report suggests that some of the contentions about schools, districts, and communities in rural areas are mistaken. Many of the issues they face also confront urban and suburban educators, and rural communities offer several distinctive educational advantages. A lack of student motivation to learn is a problem often cited by rural educators. This problem seems to be a widespread problem in most of the nation's schools--rural, urban, and suburban. This report gives special attention to student motivation to learn, along with other contributing factors to student outcomes in rural schools. Rural educators often attest to a dampening effect on student aspirations where families do not see education as an essential vehicle to advancement in life, and the improved life chances an education provides require a relocation away from a shrinking rural community. When the remoteness of a rural community is a barrier in attracting and retaining school leaders and teachers, the school's internal systems for ensuring consistent application of effective practice is paramount. The policies, programs, procedures, and practices must be engrained in the daily operations of the school in ways that optimize the productivity of current staff and readily assimilate new staff. With this in mind, this report recommends actions that drive student learning in any school setting and are necessary and achievable in rural schools. The recommendations in this report build upon the advantages of rural settings and address their perceived disadvantages.

This paper presents a Change Leadership Framework and applies the framework to the role of leadership in a State Education Agency (SEA) in setting the conditions for change to accelerate student learning. These conditions include the way the SEA directs its own change and the way it inspires and leads constructive change in districts and schools. The Change Leadership Framework includes a Change Cycle with four components--Intentionality, Capacity, Implementation, and Productivity. The Cycle revolves around Execution, the role of the Leadership Team (CEO or CSSO and executive staff) as the decision-making catalyst among the four components. The paper emphasizes the importance of (1) strategy-aligned initiatives launched by the Leadership Team; (2) functional, motivational, social, and technical capacities necessary for implementation; (3) consideration for the human dynamics attendant to change; (4) indicators of effective practice to guide implementation, and (5) monitoring effectiveness and productivity. The following are appended: (1) Change Cycle Dashboard; and (2) Glossary of Terms.

The purpose of this "Handbook" is to bolster the effective implementation of the intervention models and strategies outlined in the "2010 School Improvement Grant" (SIG) program--section 1003(g) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--in order to achieve the program's clear goal--rapid improvement of persistently low-achieving schools. The "Handbook" offers succinct and practical explanations of the SIG's required and recommended models and strategies, references to the underlying research, and connections to useful resources. The intended audience for this "Handbook" includes: (1) state education agencies (SEAs); (2) local education agencies (LEAs); (3) charter management organizations (CMOs); (4) education management organizations (EMOs); (5) organizational partners engaged in school improvement; and (6) schools engaged in rapid improvement. The "Handbook" is organized into two parts. Part I frames the purposes of the School Improvement Grants, to classify schools within performance strata and identify the "persistently low-achieving" schools, and offers a framework for diagnosing a school's performance and practice in order to target interventions and supports for rapid improvement. Part II itemizes more than 50 strategies relevant to the School Improvement Grants, connects the strategies with research, cites available resources, and offers action principles for the SEA, the LEA, and the school. Appended to the "Handbook" are: (1) Federal Guidance A:15; (2) Indicators of Effective Practice (School) (CII); (3) Indicators of Effective Practice (District) (CII); (4) Indicators of Effective Practice (Rapid Improvement Leader) (CII); and (5) Eight Elements of High School Improvement (NHSC). (Individual chapters contain references and resources.)

In 2010, unprecedented levels of resources began to flow through state education agencies (SEAs) to support dramatic change in persistently low-performing schools under the expanded federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The challenge for states is to leverage the federal investment to drive dramatic and sustainable change efforts in low-performing schools in a coherent manner that does not simultaneously undermine established support networks designed to benefit all schools. Driven by the broader goal of culling lessons related to states playing a substantive role in dramatic school-improvement efforts, this monograph and practice guide examines the early implementation of the revised SIG program in select states (AL, AK, ID, IL, LA, MI, MT, OK, and VA) to identify: (1) how states are integrating the expanded grant program into existing school improvement efforts; and (2) emerging lessons for states interested in fully leveraging their roles to drive turnaround efforts relevant to the future rounds of SIG awards. The monograph examines nine states' initial approaches to supporting dramatic school improvement initiatives by strategically allocating state resources, building district and school capacity to support change, and monitoring districts' turnaround efforts. Three appendices provide supplemental tables and the data collection instrument. A list of references and resources is included.

This report describes the Alliance for Achievement project, a guide for constructing a school community that takes into account influences of the home on school performance. The project began in 1989 when 5 Illinois schools developed a plan to focus parental involvement on "the curriculum of the home" and integrate these efforts into a conception of the school as a community that includes teachers, staff, students, and families of students. This report provides a history and the theory base of the project, along with a literature review on community. The report also recaps the Laboratory for Student Success (LSS) project of 1996-98. In that project, Alliance for Achievement was both a service provided to schools and a vehicle for ongoing research on social capital, curriculum of the home, school community, and factors that affect school learning. Data for the LSS project were collected through the School Community survey administered to 7,600 parents and 1,860 teachers in 53 schools. While this report includes several snapshots from the survey, it provides few concrete findings or conclusions. It does, however, include lessons learned and suggestions for further consideration and implementation of the Alliance for Achievement model. (Contains 10 tables and 32 references.) (WFA)

This booklet is the second in a series on educational practices that generally improve learning. Based on the view that schools can work with families to improve the curriculum of the home regardless of the family's economic situation, the booklet focuses on parents as children's first and most powerful teachers and presents principles related to what parents can do to help their children do well in school. The discussion of each principle includes a summary of research findings and a description of the implications for teaching that follow from them. The principles relate to: (1) the curriculum of the home; (2) the parent-child relationship; (3) the routine of family life; (4) family expectations and supervision; (5) homework; (6) school-home communication; (7) parental involvement; (8) parent education; (9) family-school relationships; and (10) families and communities. (Contains 46 references.) (KB)

Provides a narrative review of some literature--research, theory, and commentary--conveying the concept of school as community. Reviews sociological writings about community over two centuries and merges this line of thought with contemporary inquiry into the social contexts of schooling, including family relationships. (34 references) (MLH)

Outlines a working definition of school community, traces connections between definitional components of community and children's learning, and suggests ways to measure school community components to establish a school-improvement indicator. Results of a parent/teacher survey explore community components such as shared educational values, formation of social capital, and the curriculum of the home. (MLH)