Sequenced multi-year investment plan across teacher and principal pipelines, early childhood, high-poverty schools, funding, and assessment and accountability to achieve Leandro compliance¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (1 for, 1 mixed) · 2 studies (1 causal, 1 review), q2 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The action plan recommends that the state take immediate and six-year sequenced actions to transform its education system: ensuring an adequate supply of qualified teachers and principals, improving curriculum, instruction and assessment, expanding access to high-quality early childhood education, directing adequate and equitable funding to students with greater needs, strengthening supports for high-poverty schools and low-performing schools, and revising the state assessment and accountability systems to measure progress toward the Leandro tenets. Investments are phased in over an eight-year period across short-term and ongoing scenarios for K-12 district operations, early childhood programs, and state-level supports, with cost estimates provided for each critical need area.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Sustained, significantly increased state commitment and investment at the school, district, regional, and state levels to build and maintain capacity

Constraints¶

• The report states prior promising initiatives have neither been sustained nor brought to scale and are insufficient to adequately address the Leandro requirements

Target Learners¶

• All North Carolina K-12 public school students
• Economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities
• At-risk four-year-old children

Target Learning Goals¶

• Equal opportunity to a sound basic education
• College-, career-, and civic-life-readiness
• Closing achievement gaps among student groups

Claims¶

• A leaky pipeline limits the residency program's district benefits: only about half of completers became CPS principals within four years, at roughly $535,000 cost per new principal [~W]
• Principal turnover is common: 18% of principals leave schools each year and half of new principals leave within three years, with cascading consequences [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Provide professional learning and a bilingual workforce so preK and early elementary educators can sustain home language and oral language development
• Use growth measures rather than achievement as the primary indicator of school effectiveness in ESSA accountability
• Districts should map virtual-learning and equity actions onto the seven domains of a comprehensive, aligned principal pipeline
• Grow-your-own and recruitment initiatives: alternative programs, Minority Serving Institutions, high-school pipeline programs, and district human-capital efforts to diversify the teacher workforce.
• Short-term and longer-term state steps to scale community schools to all high-poverty schools
• Use state licensing and program approval standards, infrastructure investment, equity targeting, and pipeline reforms to improve principal learning
• Policymakers should fund and deliver authentic, job-embedded principal professional learning and remove access barriers
• Using Title II professional development funds to strengthen teacher preparation, recruitment, induction, and support in high-need schools
• Six-part strategy for assuring qualified teachers for all students
• Phased policy agenda for building a statewide pathways system: immediate low-cost COVID-recovery steps followed by longer-term investments

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• WestEd, Learning Policy Institute, & Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University. (2019). Sound Basic Education for All: An Action Plan for North Carolina. San Francisco, CA: WestEd. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED606141