Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) /School Improvement Planning

Continuous school improvement is now, fundamentally, a federal mandate with the 2002 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  Guided by ESEA, state and local initiatives, and now the national move to the Common Core State Standards, every school and district in the country needs to establish paths and set goals in the following areas:

• Comprehensive and planned school improvement
• Highly Qualified Teachers and effective classroom instruction
• Scientifically-based or research-based school and schooling practices
• Standards-based assessments and academic progress for all students (AYP)
• Safe schools and effective classroom management
• Academic interventions and ongoing "progress monitoring" assessments for elementary-aged students not passing benchmark skills in literacy
• Professional development for all educators with documented accountability
• Parent outreach and involvement

As a national school improvement project, Project ACHIEVE has worked with hundreds of schools and districts in a partnership to help them meet these ESEA mandates.  More importantly, Project ACHIEVE has focused on the primary motivation behind school improvement:  the academic and social/emotional/behavioral development, growth, and success of all students.

For Consultation Support in this Area—Contact Dr. Howard M. Knoff

ESEA/School Improvement Planning Services:

• Strategic planning, organizational change, school improvement policies, procedures, and strategies
• Integrated "Building Committee" approaches to organization and personnel management
• Professional development, peer consultation, and technical assistance procedures, strategies, and activities
• Parent and community involvement, training, and support assessments, procedures, strategies, and activities
• Clinical supervision and peer- or co-teaching strategies and procedures
• Formative and summative Program Evaluation and Accountability procedures, strategies, and activities along with the creation of functional, interactive, real-time data-bases
• Training of Trainers programs along with other systemic capacity-building and long-term institutionalization policies, stategies, and activities

Project ACHIEVE Experience in this Area:

Project ACHIEVE components have been implemented in over 1,500 schools or districts across the country—focusing especially on school improvement and ESEA processes. Project ACHIEVE is a major anchor to the Arkansas Department of Education's (Special Education Unit) State Personnel Development Grant which is implementing a comprehensive "Closing the Achievement Gap" initiative.  Specific components here involve:  school and district leadership, Positive Behavioral Support, multi-tiered student literacy and mathematics instruction and intervention approaches, and consultation-based Response-to-Instruction and Intervention services.

Project ACHIEVE has also worked with other state education departments over the years (e.g., Alaska, Kansas, Florida), and school districts from large and urban (e.g., Washington, DC, Baltimore, Tampa, San Franscisco) to small and rural.  Project ACHIEVE presentations and keynotes also have been delivered, for many years, at many notable national and state meetings—including those sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education—where ESEA strategies and issues are the main topics of discussion.