School Leadership

The Wallace Foundation is launching a $75-million initiative to help six urban school districts develop a much larger corps of effective school principals and to determine whether this improves student achievement across the district, especially in the highest needs schools. EDC will work with each district to assess the quality of its leader training programs using a tool previously developed by EDC with Wallace support. Based on that assessment, EDC will recommend ways to improve principal training to each district and its training programs.

EdTech Leaders® Online enables state departments of education, school districts, regional educational service centers, colleges and universities, and other educational organizations to develop local capacity to provide online professional development for teachers and administrators and online courses for students.

EDC, together with Academy for Educational Development, provides technical assistance at the regional level to Mali’s Ministry of Education. This technical expertise, particularly in the areas of data analysis and financial accounting, uses education data for sound activity-planning and resource-allocation decisions.

ATLAS Communities is now an independent organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit the ATLAS Communities Web site for current contact information.

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) supports the national implementation of provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to provide successful school outcomes for students with disabilities. NDPC-SD serves state and local education agencies, policymakers, researchers, school administrators, teachers, other practitioners, and parents. The Center uses evidence-based research to support state education agencies in developing model dropout prevention programs within their local school districts.

EDC is designing and facilitating a process involving eight Roman Catholic seminaries in the development of assessment measures for seminarians. The project draws upon EDC’s previous work in developing skill standards and assessment tools based on those standards. The project will result in an occupational analysis, rubrics that integrate both the occupational responsibilities of priests and the behavior attributes promoted during seminary formation, and a framework for designing portfolios rooted in these materials.

Through the Education Quality for All (EQUALL) project, EDC and our partner organizations implement activities designed to strengthen the quality and expand the coverage of complementary education in Ghana, and to create stronger linkages between nonformal and formal basic education programs. This effort will result in increased access to basic education for children—especially girls—who have not had the opportunity for schooling due to social, occupational, cultural, or other reasons; and in increased learning outcomes among participating children.

This project is creating two professional development courses, with both on-site and online versions to build the capacity of middle school teachers of mathematics and special educators and their administrators to enable students with disabilities to be successful mathematics learners. During the project, one eight-session course for classroom teachers and their special education colleagues and a six-session course for school administrators will be developed, tested, and disseminated.