According to a recent report by Civic Enterprises, Everyone Graduates Center at John Hopkins University, America’s Promise, and the Alliance for Excellent Education, 580,000 fewer students attended “dropout factories” – schools that graduate less than 4 out of 10 students entering as freshman – in 2009 than they did 10 years ago. This rate:

• is due to there being 6.4 less “dropout factories” to attend and
• three times larger than the rate deduction in the 2007-08 school year.

It’s estimated that the US has a 75% on-time graduation rate. By 2020, these organizations have a goal of a 90% graduation rate; a number that would put the US among the top leaders in high school graduates. It’s clear that turning around drop-out factories causes significant gains in the number of graduating high schoolers, but it’s still unclear what the most effective way to turn around these schools is. The Center for Public Education found that more and more research, alongside teacher feedback, shows better principals lead to more effective schools.

Researchers only recently began studying leaders and the trickle-down effect caused by their leadership role. A study by Hechinger Report shows leadership starts at the very top with superintendents who are consistent and layout groundwork for principals. These principals then need to be in an environment that benefits from their unique leadership type, whether it be a leader who transforms a school or divides the role among many people.

At LifeBound, we offer Academic Coaches Training for school leaders, teachers, counselors, administrators, mentors, and more. Coaching sessions are held as a six-day intensive that delves into different levels of coaching skills, including: listening, observing, asking powerful questions, and acknowledging. To learn more about Academic Coaches Training or to find out more about how LifeBound can customize a training program to meet your school’s needs, call us at 1-877-737-8510 or email at contact@lifebound.com. To read the full article,

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On April 5, student success expert Maureen Breeze will be presenting the webinar Parents as Coaches: Helping your Child Succeed in School and Beyond. This webinar will teach parents the coaching model and how they can use coaching skills, like listening, observing, asking powerful questions, and acknowledging, as a parenting tool to help their children make effective decisions and guide them toward success and independence.

Why should you be equipped with coaching skills? Coaching skills are important to learn when working with adolescents. As children mature, they need less directive parenting and the freedom to develop independence and critical thinking skills to help them become mature, well-adjusted adults. Parents, educators, counselors, and administrators who want to improve effectiveness with students in 5-12 grade are encouraged to join.

Visit www.lifebound.com to download or view PowerPoints from all of Maureen’s webinars. We encourage questions, comments, and anything else you wish to bring to the table. Join us and get in on the conversation.

To stay informed on dates and times of upcoming LifeBound events, go to the top right hand corner of the screen and click on the icons to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. While you’re there, you can also signup for LifeBound’s newsletter for monthly updates and deals. To learn more about this webinar and for registration information, click here.

Maureen Breeze speaking on Coaches Training at the Denver Quality After-School Connection conference

On March 29, student success expert Maureen Breeze will be presenting the webinar Parents as Coaches: Helping your Child Succeed in School and Beyond. This webinar will teach parents the coaching model and how they can use coaching skills, like listening, observing, asking powerful questions, and acknowledging, as a parenting tool to help their children make effective decisions and guide them toward success and independence.

Why should you be equipped with coaching skills? Coaching skills are important to learn when working with adolescents. As children mature, they need less directive parenting and the freedom to develop independence and critical thinking skills to help them become mature, well-adjusted adults. Parents, educators, counselors, and administrators who want to improve effectiveness with students in 5-12 grade are encouraged to join.

Maureen recently spoke to after-school providers on using coaching as a tool to help students discover obstacles, vision, and perseverance to help them overcome challenges at home, in school, and in social situations.

After the conference, Tina Martinez, Director Programs of the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Denver wrote to say:

As you said, Maureen was excellent and several people have commented that it was the best training Denver Quality After-School Connection has offered to date. Thank you for your support of this event and all you do for the youth in our community!

To stay informed on dates and times of upcoming LifeBound events, go to the top right hand corner of the screen and click on the icons to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. While you’re there, you can also signup for LifeBound’s newsletter for monthly updates and deals. To learn more about this webinar and for registration information, click here.

Officials of the U.S. Department of Education are hoping to work with Congress to introduce a new program that will alter the reporting requirements currently used to evaluate teacher quality. Since the late 1990’s, states and higher education have been required to report on teacher preparedness under standards set in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Currently, Title II requires institutions to gather roughly 440 data points from teacher-candidates in the admission process, thought by opposers to merely burden institutes with useless data. The president’s 2012 budget request addresses the need for a new formula to measure the outcomes of teacher-candidates with the new $185 million program, called the Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

Merit pay for teachers is under heavy debate but still being considered as a program that could be implemented within the next four years with Race to the Top dollars, according to a recent Times Herald article. Current teachers would be given the option to choose between the merit pay plan or stay on the same pay scale, which is currently determined by education level and years of teaching experience. Some teachers and most unions are against the push to turn teaching into a merit-paid industry because it discourages the collaboration most school communities work so hard to build and maintain. The merit-pay idea sprouts from a basic economic theory that people will work harder if their work is tied to monetary gains. However, teachers are also afraid the administrators who are responsible for spreading the bonuses are not only unqualified to decide whether a teacher is deserving, but they don’t have a system to accurately measure which numbers add up to student success.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer concluded the $75 million spent on the New York City experiment for teacher merit pay did nothing to increase student achievement. Researchers used math and English scores to gauge academic achievement and found scores worsened since 2007, when the monetary incentive was first put in place.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-08 and 2009-10 schools years, before it was quietly phased out. For students, there were negligible outcomes in attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and graduation rates.

Researchers believe the reason the initiative failed in the US, while proving to work in other countries, is because it was unclear which and how many of the test scores influenced teacher pay.

Philip Greenspun, computer scientist, educator, and early internet entrepreneur, writes on his blog, “… I was surprised that anyone thinks merit pay will work. Restaurants aren’t very important to our society or our future. Great empires have been built by countries with bad restaurants. Yet nobody would propose having restaurant compensation be determined by a government bureaucracy assigning ‘merit’ to each restaurant. We allow citizens to choose which restaurant to visit and eventually the bad restaurants wither away and disappear due to lack of customers.”

Where do you stand in the debate? Is there something you would do to improve a merit-pay initiative in your state? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.

In the recent Hechinger Report article, “Why school leadership matters” researchers reflect on how the trickle-down effects of improving superintendents and principals has been proven to come second only to teacher quality in the fight for improved student achievement. In the last few decades, school reform experiments have taken place on a wide range from local to federal, but only until recently have researchers looked to the important role school leadership plays in improving the entire school environment. The report shows leadership starts at the very top with superintendents who are consistent and layout groundwork for principals by:

Over the last decade, the idea of incorporating global and 21st century skills in curriculum has grown from an experimental initiative to a requirement for student success. In the journal, District Administration, Sarah Jerome, superintendent of the Arlington Heights and former president of American Association of School Administrators, says she thinks school leaders have become too complacent, especially in the area of allowing foreign language courses to get pulled from the curriculum.   On this past weekend, the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corps, which promotes worldwide service and understanding, it is appropriate to think of how all students can learn and act globally, especially in the United States from learning a language, to working overseas, to volunteering for causes that are strong around the world.

On Tuesday, I shared tips on how students can use social media to their academic advantage, one of which was setting your Facebook profile to private. Maureen recently received an email from a program her daughter is involved in informing her of how to talk with her daughter about the responsibility that comes with having a social media presence, the effect a bad presence can have on her future and instructions on how to set her settings to different degrees of privacy.

Since Facebook is the most popular social network used by students — and it is usually wrongly assumed that students born into the digital age are tech savvy — I think it is important to show parents, teachers, and students how to change privacy settings on the social networking site and the consequences of sharing private information in public areas. The following tips are adapted from Richard Rossi’s newsletter, “Is Your Child Sharing Too Much Online?”

The Three Privacy Groups on Facebook

In the upper, right-hand corner, click on Account and then Privacy Settings. Your child has a choice of their information being accessible to Everyone, Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, or Friends Only.

#1 – Connecting on Facebook

These settings control how other people will be able to find your child’s Facebook profile.

• Search for you on Facebook: This allows people to find a user by typing their name in the Facebook search bar. (Recommended setting: everyone)
• Send you friend requests: After a user finds someone by using the search, they send a friend request to join each other’s network. (Recommended setting: everyone)
• Send you messages: People can find you and send a message. This setting choice will probably vary depending on if you and your child decide they should be receiving messages from users who aren’t their “friend”.
• See your friend list: Your child might be using their privacy settings on Facebook, but are their friends? Just in case someone is interested in learning something about your child by looking at the crowd they run with, consider using a privacy setting on this feature. (Recommended setting: friends only)
• See your education and work; current city and hometown; likes, activities, and other connections. (Recommended setting: friends only)

#2 – Sharing on Facebook

This is where your child controls who is allowed to see their activity on their or their friends’ wall. This area should be customized from the default settings to display only the information they and you feel comfortable being public. For instance, it might be decided that sharing your child’s birthday and interests are appropriate whereas sharing their cellphone number and IM screen name is not. This information most likely has the least amount of consequences attached to it. However, to play it safe, you’re child might decide to only let “friends” have access.

#3 – Apps, Games, and Websites

You and your child need to discuss third party applications having access to their personal information. All the information that they have on their profile will be accessible when they click the “agree” button to play their favorite game or quiz. The following are some settings that you probably want to discuss customizing with your child:

• Apps you use
• Info accessible through your friends
• Public search – If your child doesn’t uncheck the option “Enable public search” their information will show up in search results on sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Social networking should be fun and kept between friends. Offer your child some scenarios, like their friend tags them in a picture that puts them in an unflattering light and a prospective employer sees it. Would they change their privacy settings? If your child has a hard time understanding why you want them to adjust their privacy settings, ask them to help you understand why it’s important to them to have their profile information public and see if there are compromises to be made. Have you had a Facebook or social networking discussion with your child or students? Please share your story in the comment box below.