The Partnership Model for School and District Turnaround is Michigan's policy for improving student outcomes in its lowest-performing schools. In compliance with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) identifies schools that rank in the bottom 5% of the Michigan School Index System as Partnership schools.…

College Promise programs aim to make students believe they can afford college, and to give them the opportunity to go to college and earn degrees without taking on significant debt. At the core of all College Promise programs is a scholarship: All eligible College Promise students receive scholarships that may cover up to 100 percent of tuition…

Executive skills are the cognitive abilities that make it possible for people to set goals, regulate impulses, and complete the steps necessary to achieve their objectives. Examples of these skills include time management, emotional control, and organization. Richard Guare and Peggy Dawson have developed a coaching strategy based on executive…

The Middle-Grades Leadership Development (MLD) Project was designed to develop principal leaders and leadership teams who create high-performing middle-grades schools. Designed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded from 2013 to 2017 by a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3)…

This article describes the use of standards to guide the reform of a struggling high school in Grant Michigan. The author describes the challenges and obstacles that the school was facing, and admits that school reform was difficult. Turnaround seemed impossible, but it held the promise of something larger than life: successful students who become…

It has been three years since Race to the Top grant-winning states piloted new teacher evaluation systems and many of them have made considerable progress, yet according to media coverage and a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in April 2015, struggles remain and most grantees have asked to extend the timetables for…

State and local educators encountered both opportunities and obstacles in their first year of implementing the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). In 2009, the ARRA, better known as the economic stimulus package, provided $3 billion for SIGs to help reform persistently low-achieving…