Notes and next steps from meetings

[Laura Kanter]

Task: Design a sectoral strategy for you area and lay out a plan of action (ppt) for the 1st year as a superintendent or state chief. Other students will serve as a panel to critique your proposal. The skill here is diagnosis, strategic planning, and initial implementation.


Session Strategy:

1. Provide context: current examples (domestic and international) of best practice in equity-driven strategies to address student needs in and out of school.
2. Focus on Chicago (CPS): Diagnose needs and landscape, develop a strategic plan for a first-year Superintendent, and develop an implementation plan.
3. Engage cohort as an evaluative panel

Next Steps:

Pick a next meeting time: LAURA sends Doodle; EMMA, KIMBERLY and ALISON select time and contact group; We acknowledge we might not be able to get everyone to all meetings.

1. Phase 1: Research to inform diagnosis (Stored on Google Doc in real time)
1. Pull together current models (domestic and international) KIMBERLY, EMMA, ALISON
2. Describe current model (not just using CPS materials) JASON, KATHERINE
3. Broader landscape of Chicago (schools, community, politics) LUCIA, LAURA

                (Jeron, do you want to join a research team?)

2. Phase 2: Diagnosis and Strategy
1. Define the sectoral problem to begin developing strategy/implementation
2. Success / effectiveness of current model

Proposed Learning Goals

• Articulate key components of community schools models.
• Articulate key implementation challenges and how to overcome them.
• Evaluate a team’s proposal/response and challenge it.
• See how our definitions of equity tie into the policy strategy.
• Understand policy levers and how this team (we) propose they be pulled.
• Connect to the Finland and Canada and other places where wrap-around values are held and espoused, in order to understand how we might advance that ideology here.
• “Go deep” on issues related to policy.
• Understand how levels of government and civic entities can share responsibility for a wrap-around school reform strategy.
• Understand possible governance systems/strategies that can support full-service schools, and where this system/strategy is located (at what level of government).
• Understand the spectrum of polices/initiatives/organizations currently in place to address issues of equity.

Guiding Principles

• Policy must address the whole child in context of the community; this will look different in different communities.
• Partnerships are critical. Coordination/movement building is critical.
• Adaptive development/support will be needed to help adults collaborate in different ways.
• We cannot do more of the same. We must examine the quality, effectiveness, and scale of current/existing efforts in order to create something that works better and at scale.
• Our proposal should solve the problem of achievement for children in poverty. [is poverty the frame we are using when we think about developing a strategy in pursuit of equity?]
• Our policy should be designed to ensure that one could not predict the achievement/attainment of a student on the basis of his/her birth.
• Our policy should be financially feasible in order to be scalable. We should be able to convince people that short-term investments will yield longer term gains.
• Our policy should also exist within parameters of feasibility: resources by region (urban, rural, suburban); standards.
• As a nation we don’t have a shared understanding of what children need. Our policy platform should address this lack of consensus and potentially define the level at which we need agreement (federal, state, local). Some level of agreement about what kids need is a prerequisite for alignment and coordination.
• Our policy recommendation must define its in-system/out-of-system/combination orientation.

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Laura Kanter
Candidate, Doctorate in Education Leadership (Ed.L.D) '14

lek...@mail.harvard.edu

c: 503-956-0217