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The New Tech Network (NTN) approach to education has recognized sucess. Classrooms are powered by project-based learning with the seamless integration of technology.

Inside New Tech Network schools’ non-traditional classrooms (no rows of desks or books, for example) you will usually find students working in small teams who are upbeat and interested in their work.  You will find teachers challenging students with rigorous and relevant, real-world projects. Attendance is through the roof, and graduation rates are 100 percent in some NTN schools. Laptops and tablets and smart phones serve as their gateway to learning, via a patented online platform called Echo.

On Thursday, more good news. New Tech Network released a report card, titled Student Outcomes Report 2013: Reimagining Teaching and Learning, which shows its decidedly different approach is preparing students for college and career at rates higher than the national average in a number of areas.  New Tech Network students throughout the country are more likely to attend college. And once they are enrolled, they are more likely to stay and be successful at rates higher than the national average (17 percent higher for four-year colleges and 46 percent higher at two-year colleges).

The Report Card contains findings from the College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA), which tests high school students on critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and writing.  Those are skills that businesses care about. Those are skills students must have to compete with their international peers. With nearly two-thirds of new jobs created through 2018 requiring a college degree, it’s imperative that students are prepared to succeed, and the New Tech approach clearly is preparing students for long-term success. Bravo!

New Tech Network, a KnowledgeWorks subsidiary, which will have schools in 23 states and Australia this fall.

Know | Trust | Empower | Connect | Honor

Recently a school leader posted a question on LinkedIn asking how to boost morale with staff during challenging times. My immediate response was to share the K-TECH framework because it helps build the foundation for a safe and purposeful classroom for everyone– students and staff. K-TECH is the acronym EDWorks’ uses for integrating characteristics of a safe and purposeful school environment into overall school improvement. K-TECH is aligned with major youth development initiatives including Josepshon Institute’s Six Pillars of Character and Search Institute’s 40 Developmental Assets. K-TECH was originally created by Ohio’s Center for Essential School Reform as part of its Framework for Building Safe and Serious Schools. While we often talk about K-TECH in reference to improving school climate for students, these same strategies can be applied to building relationships with and effectively motivating staff.

In this five part blog, EDWork’s Manager of Partnership Development and Technical Assistance Coach Michele Timmons shares ideas for implementing K-TECH as a strategy for building morale and creating a community of adult learners who can truly meet the needs of the children they serve.

Last month we highlighted T – Building Trust with your staff.

Today’s focus is E- Empowering Staff to Lead, Change and Grow Together.

Empowering Staff to Lead, Change and Grow Together.

Before we can talk about how to empower staff to lead, change and grow together it is critical to understand the concept of motivation. Dan Pink, a leading author in the area of changing the world of work, introduced three primary concepts as the basis for motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose. If you haven’t seen his YouTube video on this topic take a few minutes and check it out.

When people are engaged in meaningful work, the motivation for them to do better is not for pay, instead they are likely motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. This is the heart and soul of education. I have worked in this field for over 20 years, and it is obvious no one goes into education to become rich. Educators want to be paid enough so they don’t have to worry about money, but it isn’t what motivates them – what drives them to stay in the field.

So, what does it look like when a staff is empowered to lead, change and grow together?

Autonomy – School leaders provide opportunities for all staff to be self-directed and engage them in designing and implementing systemic changes and improvements. Rather than setting forth the entire course of action and expecting staff to ‘just do it’, these leaders engage staff in processes to innovate, think and plan together. Give staff the data and pose essential questions to guide their thinking. Then get out of the way! Using a tool such as EDWorks’ Collaborative Design Thinking Process can help leaders engage staff in making important decisions relative to the needs of their school.

Mastery – People generally want to get better at their work because it makes them feel good. A job well done is very satisfying.  Rather than using data to focus on the negative – i.e., your student performance results are not acceptable, shift the focus to mastery.  Consider an approach such as our goal is for 100% of our students to succeed at X – currently our results are Y. Begin by using the Collaborative Design Thinking Process to guide your staff through designing and testing new solutions. It may take a while for you and your staff to shift your paradigm where you all understand that these new solutions will need adjusted because not everything will work as planned. Assist your team as they in continuing continue to analyze short term results. Schools and leaders seem to believe there is a quick fix or that there is one solution and if implemented correctly, the solution will resolve the problem. Unfortunately, this isn’t the reality. Mastery takes time.  In order to ensure your staff have the ability to achieve mastery, school leaders must regularly set aside time for collaboration and design thinking. Use the formative assessment results to continually improve outcomes, but do so in a manner that honors your staff and everyone’s investments.

Purpose – Rally around the mission. What is the purpose of your school?  Does everyone know this purpose? What does it look like, feel like and sound like when your school is truly mission driven? Can everyone within the organization articulate this? When schools focus so much on outcomes or data that they forget the purpose, adults and children both begin to lose their way. Take time to engage staff in re-defining your school’s purpose and their personal purpose for being a part of the school. Co-develop opportunities for sharing successes that show how individuals are contributing to the organizational purpose.

How are you empowering your staff to lead, change and grow together by using Dan Pink’s motivation strategies of autonomy, mastery and purpose?  What successes or challenges have you experienced?

Check back next month for Part Four of EDWorks’ five-part series on implementing K-TECH as a staff morale strategy. You can also still check out earlier articles in this series:

• K- Knowing Your Staff Better
• T- Building a Sense of Trust)

For daily ideas on improving climate, culture and learning supports in your school, follow Michele Timmons on Twitter @TimmonsMichele. You can also connect with EDWorks on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and on Pinterest.

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I am in Dallas,Texas for “Breakthroughs in Education: The 2013 National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy” and, happily, the first site visit to start off the day was to METSA, a school within a school at R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, Texas.

I was last in Dallas in 2011 to shoot this MicroDocumentaries video on Mansoureh Tehrani, Director at METSA:

What’s changed since then? R.L. Turner High School has now split into four smaller “academies” or “colleges” (METSA is one of the four.) The classes in METSA are decidedly larger and the hallways more crowded. The energy is high and more than one tour participant remarked how different project based learning is – seeing it in action is always eye-opening.

Mansoureh Tehrani is still a remarkable leader and a real force of nature. No matter what activity she might be engaged in (like shooting a video or answering questions on a school tour) when the bell rings for class change you might as well not even be in the room. Her entire attention and focus shifts to the students crossing in and out of the classrooms. A word of encouragement here. A question there. The woman doesn’t even have an office and I am pretty certain she never sits down during the school day. Tehrani was very excited about a new project this year aimed at filling that time gap between AP and standardized testing and the end of the year exams. More about that and this remarkable school in another post.

There is so much we can learn from the recent indictments of so many administrators in the Atlanta public schools around scrubbing data.  I would like to focus on just one:  as long as we use data for punitive rather than constructive purposes we can expect to keep seeing these types of situations no matter how many people get thrown in jail.  This by no means excuses the behavior.  It is nothing short of abhorrent and, in the end, harms kids today and in their future.  But if we ask ourselves what is underneath someone being  motivated to act in such an irresponsible way, you could point to self-preservation.  And if you point to self-preservation, it means people do not feel like they have the space to be transparent and honest about results for fear of unreasonable repercussions.

We talk a lot about creating a culture of Failing Forward in the communities we are working with to achieve collective impact.  The idea being that we need to ensure those serving children feel like they are allowed to share not just whether they succeeded or not, but what they have learned along the way – from success and failures – and how they are applying that learning.  We often reference the practice at Google, which may actually be an urban myth, where they apparently give out regular awards to the staff who had the biggest failure.  They actually celebrate what did not work and what was learned to ensure people are not afraid to be transparent and take risks.  Now this is not to say we are encouraging folks to try just about anything and assume failure is okay.  But if we have a disciplined process for using data, focusing on building on what  works and innovating when necessary, we can create this culture of using data not just to prove what we do works, but to improve what we do every day.

I am more than dismayed by what happened in Atlanta.  But I am also hopeful that by working to build cradle to career civic infrastructure where all the partners in a community begin to focus on using data more effectively each and every day to serve children to the absolute best of our abilities, we can create a culture that ensures people embrace learning rather than resorting to cheating.

My internship was with Mrs. Schulze and Mrs. Mattice at the Napa County Auditor's Office. The Auditor's department manages the county's finances, checks, payments, and arranging our county's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). This document is for other county's to refer too when looking at Napa from the financial angle. After the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report is produced, Mrs.

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In my five years teaching at a New Tech school, I never got out of teaching the freshmen grade level. Ever. I was later told by my director this was strategic, and I now appreciate it greatly. But at the time, I had to listen to colleagues in the upper grade levels revel with enjoyment during their first months of school not having to teach how to login to the computer, how to read a rubric, how to write a contract, how to set up collaboration evaluations…the list goes on and on.

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Paul Ziobro and Serena Ng wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal about one outcome of innovation in “Is Innovation Killing the Soap Business?” Apparently an unintended consequence of creating the perfectly measured doses of detergent in Tide Pod Capsules is that consumers have stopped wasting laundry detergent. So much so that “compared with the pre-pod age three years ago, detergent sales are down 5.1% in dollar terms, to $7.06 billion from $7.44 billion.” And that got me thinking about innovation in education.

In our industrialized delivery of education students are delivered learning by the scoopful. What isn’t necessary is rinsed away. If outcomes are predicted to be harder to achieve we simply add more soap. Everything is washed on a timed cycle and when the cycle is over we move the load on down the line. But what if each student in America were delivered a perfectly measured pod of curriculum each day based on their individual learning needs? And when they proved mastery of that material they could a) go home for the day or b) study something else that interested them?

This could be the outcome of a well executed blended learning scenario. Or a natural consequence of a movement towards competency based education. In keeping with Forecast 3.0 and the “create your own school” concept described in the “Customizable Value Webs” disruption, students and their parents would be empowered to think of school less in terms of an 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. seat time requirement and more in terms of units of learning delivered – and mastered. Teacher roles would shift (see Learning Agents 2025 for some examples.) Some would act as guides, or learning coaches, for students – helping them work through online learning modules. Other teachers would adopt more traditional roles with students needing one-to-one instruction.  What needs to happen to create that opportunity? Visit the latest report from KnowledgeWorks for 10 essential elements. Then we can start to think about what to do with that 5.1% reduction (in dollar terms) in the cost of education.

 

 

When I was in college (way back in the 80s), I quickly discovered many professors issued grades based upon the Bell Curve. They only issued a certain percentage of As and Fs and everyone else was in B-D range. Oftentimes we joked that TAs (teaching assistants) just threw the papers down the stairs and whatever stair your paper landed on was the grade you received. I’m certain it a much more scientific process but the message was the same – the majority of the world is just average, so don’t expect too much more.

As the No Child Left Behind Act came into play, many schools and districts began to cite the Bell Curve as one of the main reasons why their students were under-performing. Leaders and teachers regularly made statements such as our kids are more economically disadvantaged, our students are minority and our parents don’t care about school so we will never be able to get outstanding results. The bottom line was a common belief that the Bell Curve almost pre-destined a certain percentage of schools to fail or certain groups of students to achieve at lower levels than other groups.

Today, schools across the nation are rolling out Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and full implementation is expected by 2015. Implementation of CCSS requires a significant shift in both the philosophy of education and how schools approach student learning.

Traditional Learning

to

Common Core

Content Coverage – I taught it. Student is responsible to learn it.

=>

Standards Mastery – Students discover content as they master the standards. Teacher voice – Teachers make all curricular decisions.

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Student Voice- Students have ownership in how they master content standards. Teacher as Giver of Knowledge – Lecture and recitation are key strategies.

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Student as Driver of Learning – Inquiry-based learning and brain based teaching are key strategies. Bell Curve Mentality – Teach to the middle because that meets the needs of the masses. Learning takes place within specific time frame and then teacher moves forward.

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J Curve Philosophy – All students can and will succeed given the proper instructional strategies and supports. Time becomes the primary variable because not all students meet the standards as the same time.

 

As schools begin to roll out CCSS, it is critical to start with J Curve mind shift. Leaders and teachers must begin with the belief that every school is responsible to ensure that every student grows to his / her maximum potential and that not every child will learn at the same rate of time.

This J Curve mind shift is at the heart of EDWorks’ Fast Track model which helps schools create systems which provide personalized educational plan for every student. These plans include processes to accelerate learning and reduce achievement gaps so every student graduates from high school with 45- 60 college credits, up to an associate’s degree. To learn more about Fast Track results check out an earlier blog entitled Fast Track to Higher Expectations.

How is your school making the mind shift from Bell Curve to J Curve?

Sources:

• ASQ Higher Education Brief November 2009 Apply a J-Curve to Achieve Success, Not Perpetuate Excuses By Linda Mikels, Sixth Street Prep School, and Tina Sartori, Turning Technologies
• Common Core Mind Shifts by Heather Clayton Kwit
• Implementing the Common Core by Common Core State Standards Initiative

What do your student’s really do outside of school? Are they lying to you when they say they were busy? Are you over assigning them work for a small timer period in their already busy lives? I’ll give you a rundown of my day, and you can judge for yourself.

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The New York Times recently featured a discussion on Teaching the Value of a Dollar in its Room for Debate column. Of all the responses so far, most have focused on how parents can instill money management skills through modelling behavior, allowances and budgeting lessons around the kitchen table.  But what happens if the parents lack the skills themselves to teach the concept of compounding interest? In Ohio the answer was clear – add basic personal financial acumen to the high school graduation requirement. With the new requirement  also came a raft of questions – how do schools integrate basic financial knowledge into the curriculum? And how do teachers teach personal finance when many lack basic knowledge of finance to begin with? The answer for many communities in Ohio (and elsewhere) may lie with public/private efforts like the one created at the Economics Center at the University of Cincinnati.

Presented by the Center, the Ohio Department of Education and Fifth Third Bank, the 3rd Annual Financial Education Conference is offered to educators and local school districts throughout the state at no charge.  By leveraging the expertise of its staff and the local business community, the Center is able to provide educators in Ohio with materials, curriculum, business connections, and best practices to teach economics and personal finance in their classrooms. Visit the UC Economics Center to register for the conference (at the Sharonville Convention Center) – the registration deadline is April 10th.

 

 

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Theresa Lewis has more than 20 years of teaching experience at traditional schools before she joined Clean Technologies and Sustainable Industries Early College High School as an English teacher. At this early college high schools, high school students spend a half day on their college partner’s campus taking both high school and college courses throughout the school year.

At Clean Technologies and Sustainable Industries Early College High School teachers have common planning time with staff from other disciplines. Lewis has been pleasantly surprised to see how well her English studies tie in with other disciplines in Clean Technologies and Sustainable Industries Early College High School’s problem based learning environment.

“The common planning and collaboration with the teachers from other disciplines is critical in providing a curriculum that provides deeper understanding of the material, college and career readiness skills and the support needed by students transitioning into a college environment,” Lewis said.

Lewis loves the early college high school model so much that she never wants to leave the program!

During his fifth State of the Union address, President Obama outlined his vision for his second term. Under the theme of economic recovery, the President proposed a range of initiatives, spanning from fiscal relief to energy independence. Central to this list was a renewed commitment to education reform with an emphasis on pre-K expansion, college affordability, career and technical education reform, and the establishment of a new effort to reform America’s high schools modeled after the Administration’s Race to the Top initiative.

KnowledgeWorks supports the creation of a Race to the Top for America’s high schools. Despite significant improvements in graduation rates in recent years, the number of graduating students who place into remedial coursework in postsecondary education is at a record high with 51.7 percent of community college students and 19.9 percent of students enrolled in four year institutions assigned to remediation.  The problem repeats itself in our workforce where more than 3.5 million jobs remain unfilled despite 18 million Americans looking for work. According to estimates from the Chamber of Commerce, the United States will have up to seven million unfilled jobs by the end of the decade, many of which will fall in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

As a social enterprise with more than a decade of experience in high school reform, KnowledgeWorks knows what a successful high school looks like. High School Race to the Top: 10 Essential Elements for High School Reform and College and Career Ready Success combines knowledge from our recent educational futures publication, Forecast 3.0, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem,and the experience of our subsidiary organizations who serve on the front lines of high school reform to recommend 10 Essential Elements for a High School Race to the Top competition. Together, these elements represent a new vision for education that puts students at the center, empowering them to take charge of their high school, college, and career success.

In addition to the 10 Essential Elements, our report includes the following resources:

• Policy recommendations for each element including complete legislative specifications for a High School Race to the Top program.
• A competitive preference priority for districts that apply in consortia to scale impactful reform strategies.
• A summary chart of the 10 essential elements that maps each element to insights from KnowledgeWorks’ forecast.

Professor Tony Cioffi got involved with City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology in 2008 when he participated in the designing of their scope and sequence for engineering courses. One of his goals in helping craft the early college high school’s engineering classes was to give them a “real world feel,” he said. “We wanted the students to see how math and science could be used in real world applications.”

Thus far, the classes have been a success. Cioffi is continually impressed by the quality of student work and classroom engagement.

Read more on the NYCAN blog about Cioffi’s work with City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology and learn what he considers his “success” from his engineering courses.

In a new publication Byron McCauley makes the case for Early College High Schools:

“Years of data show that Early College High School students have graduated from high school at a rate of more than 90 percent, consistently outperformed their peers who did not attend an early college high school, and earned associate and bachelor’s degrees at historic rates. The concept of a high school student — possibly an English Language Learner and certainly economically disadvantaged — entering the ninth grade and being able to take college courses successfully may seem unbelievable. Yet, with the right supports, these young students are succeeding in college and beyond, at unprecedented rates.”

Download a free copy of this important and timely (it is, after all, Early College HIgh School week) publication from the KnowledgeWorks’ Resource Room.

“Tonight, I’m announcing a new challenge, to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy.”

-          President Barack Obama, 2013 State of the Union Address

As I said in my earlier post, An Introduction to the 10 Essential Elements for High School Race to the Top, a High School Race to the Top competition must challenge the current education system by empowering education stakeholders to break through traditional barriers to learning.  In order to achieve the success President Obama spoke about in his State of the Union Address, KnowledgeWorks believes a new high school competition must include the following 10 Essential Elements along with an emphasis on STEM as the President outlined in his speech.

1. Rigor & Connectedness: Learners will demonstrate mastery of core knowledge and essential skills through performance-based assessments and digital portfolios that represent each learner’s unique potential to the world.
2. Teaching and Learning: Educators working in a variety of roles will collaborate with one another and use community and global resources to facilitate engaged learning that ignites students’ intrinsic motivation and builds students’ core knowledge and essential skills.
3. Partnerships: The learning system will support the development of public-private partnerships and harness social innovations that can expand the array of resources, organizational formats for “school,” and opportunities available to all students.
4. Student Voice: Self-directed learners will navigate diverse resources and opportunities from an expanded learning ecosystem.
5. Personalization: Learning agents will cultivate their own entrepreneurial skills in using public and private resources to develop customized learning pathways for all students.
6. Pace: Learners will draw upon their intrinsic motivation to take responsibility for evaluating available learning opportunities and for co-designing their unique learning pathways with learning agents.
7. Time: Learners will seek out and work with mentors, peer learning groups, and digital and human learning agents to navigate the array of choices offered by the learning ecosystem.
8. Assessment: Learners will use personal performance feedback from multiple digital data streams and dashboards to inform their own learning and development.
9. Technology: Learners will engage with a wide variety of learning tools, resources, and learning formats to acquire and apply core knowledge and essential skills such as collaboration, initiative, creativity, critical thinking, and perseverance.
10. Data Systems: Learning systems will develop interoperability across programs, services, data-scapes, and learning platforms and will ensure that everyone in the learning ecosystem has access to, and the capacity to use, the data needed to make effective decisions about learners.

Throughout the week, I will be holding up, via Twitter, real-world examples of schools and educators working on the ground to implement these innovative ideas.

This Thursday, we will be releasing the full policy paper; High School Race to the Top: 10 Essential Elements for High School Reform and College and Career Ready Success that dives deeper into the elements listed above and provides recommended legislative language for policymakers creating the High School Race to the Top proposal.

Although Will Ehrenfeld, Community Coordinator and Intern Teacher at Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) was shocked to hear his school mentioned in President Obama’s State of the Union address, it’s not hard for him to point to the factors that make his school a success.

P-TECH, which is part of the Smart Scholars early college high school program, is built on a successful partnership between City Tech, IBM and The City University of New York (CUNY). Each student is assigned a mentor from IBM and their schoolwork is tied to real-world work, which can help make the end goal of college and career more tangible. There are wrap-around services in place to help support students. And students are able to start taking college classes while still in high school.

“Our experience so far is that this model – the sequence and combination of opportunities – has great potential to change generations in our communities, giving an under-served population real access to middle class careers,” said Ehrenfeld. “In only 18 months since we opened, I’ve seen tremendous growth in our students and staff, as well as our partners at City Tech and IBM. While our results can only be described as preliminary, I am encouraged that we’re doing something right by the progress of our students: 10th graders’ PSAT mean exceeds the state average, and 74 of our 227 students are currently taking college courses.”

Ehrenfeld has been working with P-TECH since its planning phases in 2010. He’s observed that each position at P-TECH is unique. “We are all asked to do more, think more, and take more initiative than other schools,” he said. “Principal Rashid Davis often talks about distributive leadership, and this is an under-appreciated necessity of the model: since we are breaking new ground, everyone has to be a leader. Each new component of the school must be built, so the workplace learning course, social-emotional programs, mentoring model … all of it demands innovation. This makes P-TECH an incredibly rewarding and challenging place to work.”

Under Rashid’s leadership, school staff are able to provide students with complete wrap-around services, which Ehrenfeld sees as an essential component to the school. “We need to give students the rigorous, standards-based curriculum that will prepare them for academic success; role models, both professional and academic, who can mentor them through challenging times; and a clear route from where they are to where they want to be – from poverty to the middle class,” said Ehrenfeld.

Staff at P-TECH also works to help connect classwork with students’ futures. When Ehrenfeld reflects on his own education, he recalls courses in the humanities being more engaging while science classes, which often took place in sterile labs, seemed irrelevant. “I learned later on that science can’t be engaging if it isn’t applied; the same goes for math,” he said. “By collaborating with IBM [employees] on hands-on projects (e.g. balloon rockets, a project to celebrate E-week in February 2012) and communicating regularly through an online mentoring platform, our students come to see the value of their education.”

Seeing the value of what’s happening at P-TECH goes well beyond the student experience. Although the glow may eventually fade from being mentioned in last year’s State of the City address by Mayor Bloomberg and in this year’s State of the Union address by President Obama, people will stay focused on P-TECH and its continued success. Right now the model is expanding into more schools in New York, Illinois and Idaho.

Ehrenfeld is humbled by the attention his school is getting but hopes recognition goes where it should. “The model itself gets a lot of attention, [but] all of the good coming from P-TECH is thanks to our amazing staff, students and community of supporters.”

To help spread the word about Early College High School Week, NYCAN shared an interview with Ashley Fernandez about her experience in the Roosevelt High School Smart Scholars Program. Ashley is an 11th grader and loved being able to take college courses on a college campus. “I feel like a real college student because I have a chance to be with real college students on a real college campus doing real college work,” she said.

Read more about Ashley and her experience in the Roosevelt High School Smart Scholars Program.

One of the interesting things about working in an operating foundation is the opportunity to observe and learn from the “on-the-ground” work of our subsidiaries. It’s one of the things that makes KnowledgeWorks unique in its field of endeavor and  it also provides gratifying evidence that what sounds good on paper can often translate to what works in practice.

As we celebrate Early College High School week our EDWorks subsidiary takes center stage. Its Fast Track early college high schools are changing what it means to be a college student. Supporting students least likely to attend college simply because of their circumstances, EDWorks creates possibilities where few (or none) existed. Recently EDWorks published two whitepapers on the topic of Early College High School:  A National College Completion Agenda and  Academic and Social Supports, Activities and Guidance to Accelerate ECHS Students in High School and College .

A National College Completion Agenda by Deborah Howard, EDWorks Chief Innovation Officer, speaks to a growing body of evidence linking economic, community and national prominence to college degree attainment and the momentum  behind a national “college completion” agenda, including a significant expansion of the numbers of low income, minority and underserved students who attain a postsecondary credential.

Both publications are available for free download from the EDWorks website. If you are thinking about bringing the improved outcomes early college high schools can offer to your community, these are great resources to start off with.

A veteran urban educator, author Tom Forbes was the founding principal for two early college high schools in Ohio. For the past year he has been coaching other schools and communities seeking to design and implement early college high schools in New York and elsewhere.