Making Schools Work
All of the Urban Education Institute’s work is based on the belief that all children can learn at high levels if they are taught with skill and understanding and provided with comprehensive academic and social supports. To achieve success, we believe schools must collaborate with each other to enact eight principles. The Urban Education Institute and its four charter schools embrace these principles as their theory of action.
Principles That Matter
- High quality teaching and learning consist of ambitious intellectual work for both students and adults.
- Good schools are professional communities of learners where practice is made public.
- Distributed instructional leadership is key to insuring ambitious teaching for all children.
- Decision making based on evidence is fundamental to instructional leadership.
- High-performing schools include comprehensive academic and social supports for students.
- Parent and community engagement is essential to achieving educational excellence.
- High-quality education contributes to social justice.
- Schools that learn from each other can bring good teaching and learning to scale.
These principles are grounded in work done by the Consortium on Chicago School Research on the five essential supports for school improvement: leadership, parent-community ties, professional capacity, student-centered climate, and ambitious instruction. The essential supports were a way to capture and summarize evidence-based findings on widely-agreed upon characteristics of good schools. Read CCSR’s report about the five essential supports.
