Equity and Student Growth: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Download Research BriefAt ECRA Group, we celebrate educational leaders and school districts across the nation and their response to a once-in-a-hundred year pandemic. The overnight innovations while under immense pressure and the willingness of all educators to adapt is remarkable. Despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges, significant progress was made. Educational leaders have observed, first-hand, the…

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Tell Your Story by Defining Success

The ability to articulate and substantiate a compelling story of student success and school quality ultimately speaks to the return on investment that schools provide the communities they serve. School quality and student success are a matter of definition. For years, federal policy has controlled the definition of student success and school quality as predominately how students perform on state assessments. As educators, we know there are many additional outcomes that predict student success and align closer to the values of local communities. The story of local school districts is more comprehensive than what state report cards capture.

The state report card is only part of the story – unless the missing parts are never told. Absent the rest of the story, the incomplete story told via the state report cards becomes the full story. The idea is to provide communities the full story.

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Leadership and Return on Investment

SCHOOL DISTRICT LEADERS face challenges when they attempt to document the relationship between costs and quality. Return on investment analysis is motivated by the strategic intentions of school boards and leadership to increase quality and optimize resource allocation. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and state accountability laws have shaped a definition of…

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Evidence-Based Practice: The New Language of Leadership

Prior to the enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) school boards and the broader school community defined the superintendency narrowly by the leader’s ability to manage fiscal, physical, and personnel resources.  NCLB’s emphasis on academic achievement and school accountability began shaping a broader definition of school leadership that was far more…

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Driving Student Performance with Systemic Analytics

Improving student performance is more dramatic when school leaders employ systemic analytics. Despite continued emphasis on systemic approaches to school improvement, schools struggle to use data and information in a manner consistent with systems thinking.  Systemic thinking requires an holistic approach, one that focuses on the total school system by examining and understanding the interrelationships…

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