Policymakers know America’s educational system must transform to significantly increase the academic achievement of all students. A high-quality education, including content mastery and real world application, is critical to prepare students for college and careers. In order to ensure student success, leaders must tackle these top 5 issues facing states this year.

It was day three of a two-state tour to visit schools breaking the mold when it comes to how to educate students for the 21^st century. A colleague and I recently traveled to Denver, where we visited two schools and then to St. Paul, MN, where we met with students and staff at The Avalon School, a charter school serving grades 7-12.

Avalon has several features distinguishing it from traditional public high schools. Some are obvious, others less apparent. The most glaring difference is when a visitor tries to find the principal’s office. There isn’t one. The school has no principal nor does it have a formal administration of any sort. The teachers serve as the school’s leadership in a democratic model, reaching consensus and voting on matters of school policy. All teachers’ votes carry the same weight.

Stateline Midwest ~ September 2012

The data alone on fourth-graders’ literacy skills could have prompted this year’s surge in new laws that require early identification of struggling readers and intensive interventions. In every Midwestern state, about one in three students performs below a level considered “basic.”

Visiting The Denver Center for International Studies (DCIS), a magnet school with 600 students, grades 6-12, in the Denver Public School District, seems like taking a stroll through the United Nations. Not that I’ve ever experienced meandering the corridors of the U.N., mind you. However, if I did, I would very much expect to see flags representing countries from around the globe standing next to each doorway. I would expect to see many people whose birth country is someplace other than the U.S. And, I would expect to hear a multitude of foreign languages being spoken.

It is one thing to read or hear about education policies and practices that result in innovative and transformative schools - schools that leave the common perceptions about how teaching and learning take place in the dust. It is a quite different experience altogether to see these policies and practices in action.

I walked through the hallway at The Odyssey School in Denver recently. In many ways it looked like most K-8 public schools. Although it was only the second week of the school year, bulletin boards testified to school events. Doors led to classrooms where teachers briskly zig-zagged from one table to the next with great agility, guiding students through their assignments.

Stateline Midwest ~ June 2012

Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin are among the states this year where lawmakers have focused education-reform efforts on improving early-learning literacy.

Ensuring students are academically prepared for postsecondary education was the spark leading the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers in 2005 to push for a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn—known as the common core state standards. Because states historically have set their own academic standards, the nation has been faced with a patchwork of academic expectations. The knowledge and skills in reading, writing and math that a student was expected to have at each grade level in one state could be significantly different from those in another. This inconsistency of standards became a serious problem whenever a family moved from one state to another. Students could easily be forced to repeat material they had already learned or, even worse, face a learning gap in which they had not yet learned material that had already been covered in the state to which their families moved.  

The 2012 College Board report shows student participation in advanced placement courses increased dramatically in the decade between 2001 and 2011. However, the report also states most minority student populations are significantly less likely than white students to take an AP exam.