The following is a list of recent resources for those focused on the professional improvement of teachers, principals, and other educational leaders.

A State Policymaker’s STEM Playbook: This Promising Practices in Education report from Education Commission of the States, A State Policymaker’s STEM Playbook, highlights the Utah STEM Action Center as a case study of legislation that includes three essential elements of a successful STEM program: statewide coordination, adequate funding and evaluation. This report also identifies elements that contributed to the passage and implementation of this STEM legislation.

Study Highlights Importance of Principals in Teacher-Retention Efforts – A new study suggests that schools districts take a closer look at the principal job if they want to get to the root cause of teacher turnover and find ways to prevent it.

U.S. Department of Education Guidance on Title II and English Learners: This week, the Department released new non-regulatory guidance for Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Title II, Part A, which encourages states and districts to prepare, train and recruit high-quality teachers and principals to increase student academic achievement. Mentor programs, teacher leadership opportunities, and leveraging teacher expertise in professional learning are some of the many ways the funds may be used. In addition to this guide, the Department also recently released new guidance on serving English Learners  through ESSA that can be found here.

New Teachers Make Up a Significant Segment of Profession. Nationally, 12 percent of all public school teachers are in their first or second year, according to an Education Week analysis of new data from the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights. And in some states, that figure is more than 15 percent. (Education Week, Oct. 4)

NYC Leadership Academy’s Webinar Series: Putting the Pieces Together – The Essential Elements for a Successful Aspiring Principal Residency.  The second webinar in the series titled: It’s All About the Leader: Partnering with Mentor Principals and Coaches was held on Wednesday, September 28, 2016 –    Resources

  • A copy of the webinar PowerPoint can be found here
  • Click here To access the full residency guide

Can Student Test Scores Provide Useful Measures of School Principals’ Performance? This report assessed the predictive validity of test-based measures of principal performance that could be implemented broadly. Performance measures should have high predictive validity to be useful for informing personnel decisions about principals. The report finds little evidence that test-based performance measures accurately predict principals’ future contributions to student achievement. In addition, performance measures that accounted for students’ past achievement by measuring their growth provided, at most, a small amount of information for predicting principals’ contributions in the following year. Furthermore, averaging performance measures across multiple recent years did not improve the accuracy of these measures. (Source: Institute of Education Sciences)

Teach to Lead announced the launch of the 10th Teacher Leadership Summit! The Inclusion, Equity, and Opportunity Summit will bring teacher leaders and other stakeholders together to incubate their ideas for combating inequity and fighting for social justice on behalf of students. Ideas will leverage teacher leadership to address equity for our highest needs students and schools. The Summit will be held in Chicago on December 2-4, and applications are now open through October 26th. Even if you don’t plan to apply for the Summit, please help promote it within your networks.

2016’s Best States for Teachers. (WalletHub – September 26) WalletHub ranked Illinois the 3rd best state for teachers in 2016. Analysts compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on 16 key indicators of teacher-friendliness. The data set includes weighted scoring on factors such as median starting salary, pupil-teacher ratio, school safety, job opportunity, and work environment. Read more

The Good Ones Make Everyone Better. The most effective teachers on a team can influence their peers to improve their practice and benefit students, a recent study found. University of Washington professor Min Sun said that student learning is not based on just one teacher’s efforts, but “the combined effort of many teachers.” This positive spillover effect not only influenced students’ test scores, but increased the likelihood that they would go to college (Will, EdWeek).

Principals’ Time, Tasks, and Professional Development. This study describes how principals reported spending their time and what professional development they reported participating in during the 2011-12 school year. The study analyzes schools by grade level, poverty level, and within poverty level by whether schools made adequate yearly progress on student performance the previous year. Overall, principals reported spending an average of 59 hours a week on the job, with most of their time spent on internal administrative tasks. Though almost all principals reported participating in professional development, the most frequently reported type was workshop or conference attendance, and the least frequently reported type was university courses. (Source: Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory)