Supovitz, Jonathan A
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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 America's Choice Comprehensive School Reform Design: First-Year Implementation Evaluation Summary(2000-02-01) Corcoran, Thomas B.; Hoppe, Margaret; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Luhm, TheresaIn 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 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 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 Lived Experience of Standards Implementation in New York City Schools, 2011(2013-07-01) Goldsworthy, Heather; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Riggan, MatthewThe College and Career Readiness Standards, referred to as the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) in New York City, are increasingly the focus of educational reform efforts across the United States. Each year for the past several years, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has created a set of focusing expectations for schools in order to guide their engagement with the CCLS. In the 2011-12 school year, which is the focus of this report, the New York Citywide Instructional Expectations (CIEs) asked schools to engage in two central activities. First, teachers in grade levels or subject areas were asked to collaboratively examine student work and analyze the gaps between current curriculum, instructional practice, and student performance relative to the expectations of the Standards. Second, schools were asked to identify and implement performance-based assessments, or “tasks,” within a CCLS-aligned curricular unit, such that all students would experience at least one task in literacy and one in mathematics. The NYCDOE designed these activities as a set of carefully chosen opportunities for schools to engage with the more rigorous expectations for teaching and learning embodied in the Standards. The hope was that, by engaging with these learning opportunities, school staff would develop a deeper, shared understanding of the Standards, and could begin to address the scope of change necessary to meet the higher expectations. CPRE’s evaluation of CCLS implementation in New York City in 2011-12 allowed us to examine how a diverse sample of 16 elementary and middle schools engaged with the CIEs.Publication Building a Foundation for School Leadership: An Evaluation of the Annenberg Distributed Leadership Project, 2006-2010(2012-08-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Riggan, MatthewLeading school change is a challenging endeavor. Successful leadership requires strategic and sustained effort, particularly in the shifting and uncertain environment of urban public schools. The concept of distributed leadership—in which multiple actors tackle the challenges of school leadership in concert—is a promising way to strengthen professional practice and thereby improve the educational experiences of all students. The Annenberg Distributed Leadership (DL) project was one of the first efforts in the nation to deliberately take on the challenge of designing and implementing a concerted effort to build distributed leadership capacity in a diverse set of urban schools to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The DL project featured the careful selection of leadership team members to identify and lead instructional improvement efforts; ample professional development to build cohesive teams and help members understand the motivational, psychological, and pedagogical aspects of advocating instructional change; resources to apply to the task; and ongoing school-based coaching to guide leadership team efforts. This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s mixed-method evaluation of the DL project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study, and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation.Publication From Multiple Choice to Multiple Choices(1997-11-05) Supovitz, Jonathan AAre standardized tests an equitable way to measure the achievement of America's children? A fresh, four-year study by the Educational Testing Service of the gender gap on standardized tests concludes that differences in performance between boys and girls are real, but not large, and cut both ways. ("ETS Disputes Charges of Gender Bias," May 14, 1997.) Still, critics of standardized testing, like the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, blast the ETS study as "a smoke screen designed to divert attention from the ongoing problems with the exams they publish."Publication Slowing Entropy: Instructional Policy Design in New York City, 2011-12(2013-01-01) Supovitz, Jonathan ADistrict policy makers never have more potential influence than when they are crafting a policy. They hold an abundance of choices about the ways they might frame the policy; the language they could use to communicate the policy; the resources they could expend to support the policy; and how they choose to situate the policy within other existing and planned policies and initiatives. Yet, once they introduce the policy into the world, its entropy begins, as the objects of the policy interpret, reframe, and situate it within their own priorities, contexts, and interests. In this paper, Dr. Jonathan Supovitz argues that the success of an instructional policy depends to some extent on the choices made in its crafting before it is let loose upon the world. The way a policy is framed and designed has important implications for the way people receive and understand it, and the extent to which they respond to it. The choices embedded within its design are essentially a set of signals that interact with a variety of influences, both real and perceptual, as it is received, interpreted, and enacted upon by its intended audience.Publication From the Inside In: An Examination of Common Core Knowledge & Communication in Schools(2014-03-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Fink, Ryan; Newman, BobbiIn this report, CPRE researchers explore how Common Core knowledge and influence are distributed inside of schools and how these configurations may help teachers to engage with the Common Core and influence their understanding and implementation. To do so, we used a mixed-method approach to examine knowledge and influence in eight schools, including five elementary schools and three middle schools. Our central method was a survey of knowledge and influence of all faculty members in a sample of eight schools. These data are supplemented with interview data from a purposeful sample of teachers and administrators in the eight schools. Sponsored by the General Electric Foundation, which also provides support to New York City through its Developing FuturesTM in Education Program, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania has examined Common Core implementation in New York City in a series of studies. In 2013 CPRE released the findings of two investigations, one which described how the district constructed the 2011-12 Citywide Instructional Expectations (CIEs) for teachers, which were a small number of assignments for school faculties to complete during the school year to facilitate their engagement with the new Common Core (Supovitz, 2013). The second report examined how a diverse sample of 16 schools understood and implemented these CIEs and how their choices influenced their levels of engagement (Goldsworthy, Supovitz, & Riggan, 2013). A third report is a companion to the current report, focusing on teacher collaboration as a means of cultivating and transferring knowledge about the Common Core.Publication #COMMONCORE Project (2017) How Social Media is Changing the Politics of Education(2017-03-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Kolouch, Christian; Daley, Alan J.; Del Fresno, MiguelFueled by impassioned social media activists, the Common Core State Standards have been a persistent flashpoint in the debate over the direction of American education. In this innovative and interactive website we explore the Common Core debate on Twitter. Using a distinctive combination of social network analyses and psychological investigations we reveal both the underlying social structure of the conversation and the motivations of the participants. The central question guiding our investigation is: How are social mediaenabled social networks changing the discourse in American politics that produces and sustains social policy? ABOUT #COMMONCORE PROJECT In the #commoncore Project, authors Jonathan Supovitz, Alan Daly, Miguel del Fresno and Christian Kolouch examine the intense debate surrounding the Common Core State Standards education reform as it played out on Twitter. The Common Core, one of the major education policy initiatives of the early 21st century, sought to strengthen education systems across the United States through a set of specific and challenging education standards. Once enjoying bipartisan support, the controversial standards have become the epicenter of a heated national debate about this approach to educational improvement. By studying the Twitter conversation surrounding the Common Core, we shed light on the ways that social media social networks are influencing the political discourse that, in turn, produces public policy.