Category Archives: Newsletter 2012

By Cleo Crank, Teacher, Greenville Technical Charter High Schools, Greenville, SC “You haven’t made a fire till it has burned. You haven’t made a dollar till it’s earned, And no teaching has transpired, If the child has not acquired, You haven’t taught a child till he has learned.”   Swen Nater, NBA star player Inspired [...]

By Sabine Zander, The National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST) Introduction It’s all about relationships. This was the consensus reached among participants of the NCREST workshop, “Taking Advantage of Underused College Resources and Support Services,” at the Middle College National Consortium Summer Professional Development Institute 2012. The four-person panel consisting of Deb [...]

Middle College National Consortium is pleased to announce that Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, the renowned Stanford University educator, will give the keynote address at MCNC’s 21st annual Winter Principals’ Leadership Conference. She will be available for a question and answer session subsequent to her keynote address. Professor Darling-Hammond is renowned for her work on school restructuring, teacher quality, and educational equity. In 2006 Professor Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation’s ten most influential people affecting educational policy for her work, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, that led to sweeping changes in teaching and teacher education. She created the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network.

Last Spring the Middle College National Consortium (MCNC) held a JAM (an online asynchronous conversation) on the role of Peer Review in teacher evaluation. Consensus was that leadership is needed to create a viable Peer Review Process. While we are in a society that wants results immediately, time is needed for a full implementation of the process while teachers learn to give and receive feedback from peers. The Peer Review Process is most effective when the entire staff works to implement an instructional practice to improve student outcomes. Lastly, Peer Review and evaluation can mix when multiple indicators are used for teacher evaluation and there is role clarity and professional development for implementation

In New Haven, Connecticut, the city-wide drop¬out rate for high school students exceeds 27%. We’ve known for too long that there’s a massive achievement gap in our state, but the elephant in our local community’s room has been the communication gap and lackluster strategies between the high schools and the college.