Profiles of the Regional Educational Laboratories

Western Regional Educational Laboratory at WestEd

Mission

WestEd, a research, development, and service agency, works with education and other communities to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults. WestEd's regional educational laboratory brings R&D knowledge and processes to inform policy and strengthen practice in a four-state region. A central goal is to help under-performing schools become places where all children succeed. Laboratory staff develop powerful tools and processes to help bring that transformation about, conduct applied research, and make knowledge and tools widely available through products and partnerships with regional service agencies.

Regional Problem Areas to be Addressed

Four dimensions identified by regional educators and WestEd's Board of Directors as critical to reform are the focus of work in this 5-year contract:

• Aligned standards-based accountability systems that support effective practices and student achievement;
• School and district leadership that can build high-performing learning communities;
• High quality teachers recruited and supported throughout their careers to reach high levels of accomplishment; and
• Strong communities that support children by strengthening families, schools, and other community institutions.

Standards-based accountability (staff contact: Paul Koehler). As the western states strive to put in place standards-based accountability systems focused on results, they encounter many barriers: lack of coherence across state, district, and school practices; poor alignment across standards, assessments, and accountability measures; and inadequate support mechanisms to build the capacity of students, teachers, and administrators to meet the increased expectations. WestEd's work focuses on helping policymakers create coherent systems aligned at state and local levels, and on strengthening the capacity of educators to use that system. WestEd provides expert policy assistance, a series of Policy Briefs, and tools and processes that promote use of student achievement data to guide school decisionmaking. Partners in the development of data-use tools include the Regional Technology in Education Consortium, the Eisenhower Math-Science Consortium, and local service providers working with low-performing schools such as Utah's Title 1 Distinguished Educators and California's External Evaluators.

Leadership (staff contact: Kate Jamentz). Low-performing schools need strong leadership to bring about real change. To be successful, leaders need to learn how to guide school communities in setting common high standards, support teachers to use student work diagnostically to plan instruction, and promote collective action to improve student performance. New forms of distributed leadership are essential. But preparation for these new core competencies is hard to come by. WestEd is working with districts and states to create effective infrastructures that provide high quality professional development for school and district leaders. Tools and strategies for developing core skills, including protocols, facilitator training and video cases, focus on community engagement and guiding standards-based practice. Key partners include the California School Leadership Academy, Nevada's Professional Development Networks, the Student Success Alliance in Utah, and the K-12 Center at Northern Arizona University.

Teacher quality (staff contact: Aida Walqui). The western states recognize the critical importance of high-quality teaching and are working to build support for teacher development across a continuum from recruitment through preservice and induction to career-long learning. But teacher shortages and the demands of high-poverty environments often mean that the students who need the most help are in classrooms with underprepared teachers. The need is especially urgent as it relates to one of the fastest growing portions of the student population: students who are not native English speakers and those whose home cultures differ significantly from that of their teachers. WestEd's Teacher Quality Initiative is working with states and teacher education stakeholders to ensure that a coordinated system supports the professional growth of classroom teachers through all stages of their careers. In addition, in partnership with Stanford University and the New Teacher Center, staff are developing multimedia products and processes to help teachers work more effectively with English language learners.

Strong communities (staff contact: Beth Ann Berliner). Recent research clearly shows that what's needed to improve student achievement is not limited to what goes on inside the schoolhouse doors and during the customary school day. Educational success requires reversing the effects of poverty by rebuilding neighborhoods into safe, thriving, and desirable places that support families to live, work, raise, and educate their children. In a multiyear innovative effort bringing together the best ideas and practices from school reform, family support, and community building, WestEd will work in partnership with a Community Laboratory site to create a comprehensive approach to support children by strengthening families, schools, and other community institutions. This effort includes developing specific processes to enhance the effectiveness and health of local service agencies and outreach to families.

National Leadership Area

Assessment of educational achievement (staff contact: Stanley Rabinowitz). Major assessment issues confronting policymakers and educators nationwide include: alignment of national, state, and local assessments with content standards, technical adequacy of different forms of assessment, efficiency so that the burden of assessment is distributed across grades and schools, and flexibility and balance across state and local levels. Complementing ongoing work in more than 20 states, WestEd will bring together quarterly a national group of assessment and accountability specialists identified by state policymakers. In collaboration with this National Assessment Work Group, WestEd will: synthesize what is already known about key topics in a series of Knowledge Briefs, identify the most relevant knowledge gaps and research those gaps, and explore solutions to critical problems. A topic theme will be chosen each year; the focus in year one is high-stakes testing. An Annual Assessment Conference will be cohosted each fall with the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment.

Key Accomplishments

Guiding standards-based practice. Working intensively with leadership teams in northern California districts and schools, the Western Assessment Collaborative (WAC) developed a powerful strategy for helping schools and districts really understand and engage in standards-based practice. The strategy proved highly successful in enabling schools to establish performance standards, use classroom and schoolwide assessments to guide teaching and learning, develop new instructional skills, and dramatically increase public engagement in decisions about how to define, measure and improve school quality. Student performance also improved; for example, 89 percent of project schools met California's Academic Performance Index growth targets. This work continues in the Leadership Initiative. To build the capacity of district leaders and principals around the region to effectively implement standards-based practice, additional tools and processes based on WAC's work will be developed and disseminated.

Data-driven decisionmaking. Making sense of data and using data to guide planning for school improvement became easier for schools and districts that worked with WestEd in the last contract. From workshops on interpretation of test data to field-testing use of a Quality School Portfolio process developed by Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing as part of their improvement planning, educators found strategies to help them with an urgent need. As accountability requirements increase, and as technology provides new tools for database development and reporting of data, schools need technical help, but even more so, they need to use these technical skills to inform local planning. In the Standards-based Accountability Initiative, staff and partners will build on this earlier work and develop an expanded set of resources to support data use within a framework of inquiry and planning.

Upcoming Products and Events

Series of policy briefs on critical topics published quarterly. Time & Learning: Making Time Count published April 2001.

Series of knowledge briefs on highstakes assessment, addressing topics such as intended and unintended effects of high-stakes testing, technical adequacy, and the status of computer-assisted testing, to be published throughout the year.

Video that shows how teachers can analyze student work as evidence of what students know and to guide instructional decisions (Winter 2001).

Regional seminars on critical topics in teacher development, One of this year's seminars will focus on supply and demand in teacher development, new sectors, and the use of technology (Spring 2001, San Francisco, California).

Regional Superintendents' Institute. Network meetings for superintendents and leadership teams of urban districts focused on low-performing schools (Inaugural meeting, Fall 2001).

National Assessment Conference cohosted annually with the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (Fall 2001).

[The Regional Educational Laboratory at SERVE]

This page last modified August 29, 2001 (jer)