Consortium for Policy Research in Education
The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) is a community of researchers from renowned research institutions and organizations committed to advancing educational policy and practice through evidence-based research.
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Publication Dashboard Lights: Monitoring Implementation of District Instructional Reform Strategies(2004-12-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Weathers, John MIn this report, the authors describe the system implemented in Duval County Public Schools (Florida) to monitor the district’s instructional reform efforts and the influences of the system on teachers and school and district leaders. The system, called the Standards Implementation Snapshot System, was implemented by John Fryer, Superintendent of Duval Public Schools, in 2002. The snapshot system seeks to take a "snapshot" at a point in time of the depth of implementation of the district’s standards-based reform initiatives. This report is the story of the development and influence of the snapshot system.Publication Partnering With School Districts to Improve Mathematics Instruction(2016-03-03) Supovitz, Jonathan APublication In Search of Leading Indicators in Education(2012-07-10) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Foley, Ellen; Mishook, JacobData have long been considered a key factor in organizational decision-making (Simon, 1955; Lindblom & Cohen, 1979). Data offer perspective, guidance, and insights that inform policy and practice (Newell & Simon, 1972; Kennedy, 1984). Recently, education policymakers have invested in the use of data for organizational improvement in states and districts with such initiatives as Race to The Top (United States Department of Education, 2010) and the development of statewide longitudinal data systems (Institute for Education Sciences, 2010). These and other initiatives focus attention on how data can be used to foster learning and improvement. In other fields, including economics and business, much work has been done to identify leading indicators that predict organizational outcomes. In this paper, we conceptualize how leading indicators might be used in education, using examples from a small sample of school districts with reputations as strong users of data. We define leading indicators as systematically collected data on an activity or condition that is related to a subsequent and valued outcome, as well as the processes surrounding the investigation of those data and the associated responses. Identifying leading indicators often prompts improvements in a district’s system of supports. To develop this concept, we describe four examples of how districts identified and used key indicators to anticipate learning problems and improve student outcomes. We also describe the infrastructure and other supports that districts need to sustain this ambitious form of data use. We conclude by discussing how leading indicators can bring about more intelligent use of data in education.Publication The Linking Study: An Experiment to Strengthen Teachers' Engagement With Data on Teaching and Learning(2013-04-01) Supovitz, Jonathan AIn this AERA 2013 paper, Dr. Jonathan Supovitz investigates what it means for teachers to fruitfully use data to enhance the teaching and learning process. Informed by research on the challenges teachers face to use data meaningfully, and clues from the rich literature on formative assessment, this paper reports on the design and effects of an intervention designed to help teachers connect data on their teaching with data on the learning of their students for the purpose of informing subsequent instruction which leads to better student outcomes. The hypothesis of this study, therefore, is that while examining data may be useful, the real value of data use is to examine the connection between data points – in this case the instructional choices that teachers make and the learning outcomes of students. Thus, ‘data use’ in this study means encouraging and facilitating teachers’ analytical experiences of linking data on teaching to data on the learning of their students.Publication TASK: A Measure of Learning Trajectory-Oriented Formative Assessment(2013-06-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Ebby, Caroline Brayer; Sirinides, Philip MThis interactive electronic report provides an overview of an innovative new instrument developed by CPRE researchers to authentically measure teachers’ formative assessment practices in mathematics. The Teacher Analysis of Student Knowledge, or TASK, instrument assesses mathematics teachers’ knowledge of formative assessment and learning trajectories, important components of the instructional knowledge necessary to teach to the high expectations of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Researchers found that the majority of teachers of mathematics in grades K-10 in urban and urban fringe districts focused on their students' procedural skills rather than their conceptual understandings, indicating that there is significant room for growth in teacher capacity to identify, interpret, and respond to students' conceptual understanding.Publication America's Choice Comprehensive School Reform Design: First-Year Implementation Evaluation Summary(2000-02-01) Corcoran, Thomas B.; Hoppe, Margaret; Luhm, Theresa; Supovitz, Jonathan AIn the fall of 1998, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) contracted with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to conduct the evaluation of the America’s Choice School Design. This is a summary of CPRE’s first report of a three-year evaluation of the design. The evaluation of America’s Choice seeks to answer four basic questions: Are schools successfully implementing the America’s Choice program design? What environmental characteristics are facilitating or impeding implementation? How effective is America Choice’s implementation strategy? And what are the impacts of the program on teachers and students? As America’s Choice is still in the early stages of implementation, most evaluation efforts are directed toward the questions about the implementation of the program and the conditions surrounding its implementation. In subsequent years, CPRE increasingly will emphasize its evaluation of the impacts of the program on students. This report describes the first year of the implementation of America’s Choice. Following this introduction, section two provides a description of America’s Choice and the theory behind the America’s Choice school design. Section two concludes with a set of reasonable expectations for the progress of America’s Choice in its first year. Section three describes CPRE’s findings concerning the implementation of America’s Choice, including many of the specific design components. Section four analyzes the role of the school district in the implementation of America’s Choice. The report concludes with a summary of the findings of the first year’s evaluation.Publication Instructional Leadership in a Standards-Based Reform(2001-12-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Poglinco, Susan MThe spotlight of educational leadership is on instructional leadership. As pressure for improving student performance in the current standards-based accountability environment swells and test results are increasingly scrutinized, school principals are being urged to focus their efforts on the core business of schooling--teaching and learning. But what does it mean to be an instructional leader? What do principals that are instructional leaders do differently than other principals? How do they spend their time? How do they shape the cultures of their schools? How knowledgeable are they of subject-matter content? How do they work with, and develop, other leaders in their schools? In this study we sought to find answers to these questions by exploring the collective wisdom of several effective instructional leaders. Instructional leadership, not just by the principal but by a wider cast of individuals in both formal and informal leadership roles, can play a central role in shifting the emphasis of school activity more directly onto instructional improvements that lead to enhanced student learning and performance. By contrast, the status quo in most schools is diffuse attention to instruction scattered amidst a variety of environmental, social, and organizational distracters that lead to fragmented and uneven instructional focus. Principals are typically engrossed in organizational care-taking and the responsibility for instructional decisions falls to individual teachers. When individual teachers independently determine the kind and type of instruction in their classrooms, three things tend to occur. First, the instructional culture of the school tends to splinter, as there is no overriding instructional guidance and no coherent glue to tie instruction to a larger whole. Second, the quality of instruction varies widely, as teachers bring different experiences and have different notions of what is good teaching. Third, the content that students receive, even in the same grade, differs from classroom to classroom, as each teacher prioritizes what students ought to know.Publication Meaningful & Sustainable School Improvement with Distributed Leadership(2019-06-14) Supovitz, Jonathan A; D'Auria, John; Spillane, James PSchool leadership is broadly acknowledged to be the lynchpin for school success. Yet, amongst the countless demands that school leaders face, making wise leadership choices is increasingly challenging. On what should leaders focus their attention and how should they prioritize their improvement efforts? How can they identify, understand, and make headway on the difficult challenges that will substantially enhance the educational experiences of their students, and how can they bring their faculty together with commitment around these improvement efforts? In this essay we lay out a research-informed framework for advancing meaningful school improvement using a distributed leadership approach. This report was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Opinions in this paper reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, that of the funder.Publication Parallel Play in the Education Sandbox: The Common Core and the Politics of Transpartisan Coalitions(2016-01-01) McGuinn, Patrick; Supovitz, Jonathan AIn Parallel Play in the Education Sandbox: The Common Core and the Politics of Transpartisan Coalitions,” Patrick McGuinn and Jonathan Supovitz examine the successes and limits of transpartisan opposition to Common Core. What are the lessons of the Common Core fight for education policy? Are there lessons applicable to other fragile areas of bipartisan cooperation? This report is the third in a series of New Models of Policy Change case studies published by New America.Publication Typology of Teacher Leadership Programs(2019-01-08) Berg, Jill Harrison; Horn, Peter; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Margolis, JasonEducation leaders are perennially seeking new ways to build the capacity of teachers to enhance learning experiences for all students. Teacher leadership, which we define as teachers’ support of the improvement of teaching and learning beyond their own classroom, has long been a source of interest and experimentation (Wenner & Campbell, 2017; York-Barr & Duke, 2004). Teacher leadership recognizes teachers’ instructional expertise as an asset for educational improvement, capitalizes upon teachers’ relationships with their colleagues to support change, and may provide career advancement opportunities to improve job satisfaction and the professionalization of teaching. For these and other reasons, states, districts, funders and teachers themselves have become increasingly interested in the promise of teacher leadership. In this study, we map the landscape of teacher leadership programs across the U.S. and identify commonalities and distinctions amongst the range of programs. Using a variety of search approaches to capture publicly-available information, we document 285 state, local, university, and foundation-sponsored programs that use a variety of techniques to support teachers as leaders. We then categorize the forms of support, attending to program models, objectives, sponsorship, and audience. We identify three major forms of support provided by teacher leadership programs: (1) preparation of teachers with knowledge and skills that can help them to lead; (2) positioning of teachers in leadership roles to capitalize upon their expertise; and (3) recognition of teachers as leaders through awards and other forms of appreciation or acknowledgement. While some programs focus only on one of these approaches, most employed a combination of these forms of support. Based on this, we define seven types of teacher leadership programs and provide an interactive depiction of this typology, with examples, to illustrate the variation within each of the seven types. While there are undoubtedly programs that escaped our view, as well as homegrown and informal initiatives that we could not document, this systematic search is the broadest scan of the teacher leadership program landscape conducted in the Unites States to date.