News
IEL Participates in Celebration of Landmark Disability Rights Legislation - American's With Disabilities Act
July 26, 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of the enactment of federal disability civil rights legislation known as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which bars discrimination based on disability in employment, public and private sector services, transportation, and recreation. The ADA also codified disability public policy to promote inclusion, integration, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for all youth and adults with disabilities. Over the past two decades, federal laws, programs, and services have been updated and aligned with the ADA.
To mark the historic nature of the ADA, organizations and government agencies are hosting a multitude of celebrations in Washington, DC and across the country. The Institute for Educational Leadership’s (IEL) Center for Workforce Development (CWD) is helping mark this anniversary by cosponsoring and participating in a number of these celebrations. Learn more...
New Cyber Disclosure Workbook for Youth with Disabilities Available from IEL’s National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth
IEL’s new Cyber Disclosure for Youth with Disabilities Workbook is a supplement to The 411 on Disability Disclosure: A Workbook for Youth with Disabilities which helps youth learn about disability disclosure and what it means for them. Since the original workbook was written in 2005, there have been many advances in technology that have changed what youth need to know about disclosing their disability.
Search sites like Google, social networking sites like Facebook, and micro-blogging sites like Twitter have added a new element to disclosure. Now it is possible to disclose your disability on the internet without even being aware of it. This can be as simple as a picture of you using a wheelchair, a comment on your friend’s blog about disability, or your profile posted on a disability organization’s website. The goal of this document is to provide suggestions for youth with disabilities about how to make an informed decision about your own disability disclosure and to manage your disclosure online. Learn more…
IEL President Marty Blank Chats with Building Neighborhoods Blogger Patrick Lester about the Similarities between Promise Neighborhoods and Community Schools
The Administration’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative has a lot in common with the community schools strategy. During a June 19, 2010 interview with Patrick Lester, Policy Director of United Neighborhood Centers of America, Marty Blank highlights the commonalities and connections between Promise Neighborhoods and the community schools strategy:
Schools are at the center of the Promise Neighborhoods strategy… from a community school perspective every school in a Promise Neighborhood will be a community school. [They] represent a paradigm shift from previous policies that relied solely on accountability to get results. They recognize that community issues are school issues.
According to Blank, who is also the Director of the Coalition for Community Schools, all schools in Promise Neighborhoods should be community schools – regardless of the type of school (traditional public school, charter public school, magnet school, alternative school); regardless of who operates the school (local school district, community-based organization -CBO, higher education institution, educational management organization); and regardless of size or curricular focus. Read more…
IEL Releases Initial Summary of Individualized Learning Plan Study
States continue to refine graduation requirements to meet the now widely accepted goal that all students be ready for college and the workplace when they graduate from high school. In almost half of the states, one strategy employed is the requirement that all students develop an individualized learning plan (ILP) prior to graduation. ILPs refer to both a document that is created and maintained as well as a process that helps students engage in the career development activities necessary for them to identify their own career goals.
Individual planning is not a new idea. Since the 1970s, federal requirements for students with disabilities have included an individualized education program (IEP). The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP), charged with the responsibility to find promising practices to improve the employment outcomes for people with disabilities, is supporting a multi-year study to assess whether quality ILPs improve the readiness of all students, including youth with disabilities, for post-school outcomes.
The ODEP study launched in the 2008-09 school year and targeted for completion in 2012-13, is the first longitudinal research and demonstration project designed to understand the effectiveness of ILPs. It looks at ILPs in 14 (rural, urban and suburban) schools in four states (LA, NM, SC, and WA).
The research is built around core features included in the Guideposts for Success, a publication of the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability/For Youth (NCWD/Youth), housed at IEL. NCWD/Youth and its partners, the Center for Education and Work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the Institute for Community Integration at the University of Minnesota are conducting the research project. Learn more…
American Federation of Teachers Passes Resolution Supporting Community Schools
Johnson is a community school that gets the important pieces in place and lined up—great teachers and staff, strong curriculum, fun and engaging activities for summer and after school, and an amazing array of services that remove barriers to success for the kids and their families. These things make a huge, huge difference.
- Randi Weingarten, President of American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), praising a Minnesota community school
at the 2010 AFT national convention in Seattle
At the July, 2010 AFT Convention in Seattle, the AFT passed Resolution #75, recognizing the principles of community schools as one of their main priorities. It calls for community school support which would include legislation, funding, and staff development. The Resolution passed with a unanimous vote.
AFT advocates for five community school principles: a strong academic curriculum; partnerships that integrate services; a variety of providers and funders in those partnerships; multiple types of community service programs; and a written strategic plan. Read more…
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, calls for schools to become community havens.
Community Schools featured on Fox 29 News in Philadelphia!
ED's Blueprint for Reform: ESEA Reauthorization
The Administration's Blueprint, based on feedback from their listening tour, provides incentives for states to adopt academic standards that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and create accountability systems that measure student growth toward meeting the goal that all children graduate and succeed in college. Read the Blueprint and view President Obama's weekly address focused on the Blueprint.
Goffin Strategy Group (GSG) releases two new publications
Two publications from the Goffin Strategy Group (GSG) document that the field of early care and education (ECE) is at a crossroads, and assert that this defining moment calls for field-wide leadership.
Field-Wide Leadership: Insights from Five Fields of Practice reports on a GSG’s study to determine whether and how other fields of practice exercise leadership related to issues that are of field-wide importance and necessitate a broad swath of the community to resolve. Five fields of practice were explored ― Financial Planning, Nursing, Opportunity Finance, Quality Management, Social Work ― and a new term was coined as a part of the work. Field-wide leadership is internally directed leadership that has as its purpose the advancement of an overall field of practice in terms of coherence and effectiveness. The GSG study found that field-wide leadership is a viable construct and that examples of field-wide leadership are widely available.
Leadership Development in Early Care and Education: A View of the Current Landscape assesses the field of ECE’s progress in attending to leadership development, and identifies how the field defines leadership based a surface review of 87 self-identified ECE leadership development programs. The GSG found that the 87 programs fell into 3 primary categories: teacher preparation; program improvement; and leadership skill development, and that the programs varied greatly in terms of robustness and viability.
IEL served as the fiscal agent for both reports which were funded by the McCormick Foundation. The reports can be downloaded for free at www.goffinstrategygroup.com. As well, additional information about the Goffin Strategy Group can be obtained at www.goffinstrategygroup.com.
IEL Sits on NCATE’s Blue Ribbon Panel for Clinical Preparation, Partnerships and Improved Student Learning
President Blank recently attended NCATE’s work group meeting which included experts in education research, policy, teaching and learning and leaders in higher education and P-12 schools at the state and local level. The panel will make recommendations for restructuring the preparation of teachers to reflect teaching as a practice-based profession akin to medicine, nursing, or clinical psychology.
Secretary Duncan Participates in DC VOICE Town Hall with IEL Staffers
Recently, as part of his Listening & Learning tour, Sec. Duncan paid a visit to Luke C. Moore Academy Senior High School in North East Washington, D.C., Ward 5. He joined more than 100 educators, parents, students, policymakers, and community members in a town hall discussion on improving education. Conversation at each table focused on two major topics: community schools and teacher quality. Read more and view video of this town hall.
IEL in partnership with ACES, Advanced Innovation, LSU, and SCSU will hold conference for Leaders in Education
This National Leadership Conference will be held on January 6-8, 2010 at the Cook Conference Center in Baton Rouge, LA. The conference will engage school leaders and school policymakers, who are working towards sustainable systemic change, in conversations about the leadership skills needed to navigate the politics and policies they encounter at a local, state and national level. Register.