We believe that all children—regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or gender—can and will achieve expected content and performance standards needed to be successful at the next grade level for the next year.

We believe that all children—regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or gender—can and will achieve expected content and performance standards needed to be successful at the next grade level for the next year.

Children learn and will master the challenging standards set for them through the hard work, dedication, knowledge and skills of their teachers. To meet these new high expectations for student achievement, teachers need continual opportunities at their schools to develop with colleagues instructional strategies and deep content knowledge. All parts of the system—board of education, district and site administrators, support staff, parents and community—must work together to coordinate and align resources to support teacher learning and teachers’ work.

The Center bases its work in the Effective Schools correlates, first identified by Ron Edmonds in 1979, and repeatedly confirmed by thirty years of national and international studies. These correlates serve as a framework for school improvement and require an extended and systemic view of change.

Knowledge of how children and adults learn has expanded exponentially in recent years. The Center, therefore, actively draws on current theories of student and adult learning, which recognize the need for all learners to actively engage with interesting and complex problems and ideas, make literacy the core, connect their current learning to prior knowledge and experiences, and participate in meaningful conversation. In particular our process focuses on the development of team learning, organizational learning and cultivating communities of practice, within the district and at each school.

• Significantly increase the number of students who meet curriculum content standards and are prepared for college prep classes.

• To provide a framework that will allow teachers to coordinate and maximize efforts to enhance student learning and achieve the growth targets they have set.

• To support the development of inquiry-based school communities focused on continuous improvements in teaching and learning.

In 1966, education researcher James Coleman, issued the Equality of Education Opportunity Report, commonly referred to as the Coleman Report, in which he concluded that school inputs, such as books in the library and teacher's years of training, were not as significant to student learning. This raised the question – What value do schools add to children's learning?

Researchers Ron Edmonds and Larry Lezotte could not accept the premise that schools do not make a significant difference. They set out to find schools serving the poor where children were learning. Their research pointed to a set of characteristics, referred to as effective school correlates, describing the culture and learning climate of low-income schools where students were achieving. The language of the effective school correlates has evolved through the years, but its meaning has continually led school administrators and teachers towards looking at ways to improve the culture of a school, and the achievement of its students.