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Social and emotional learning (SEL) is critical for preparing students for college and career success. Integrating SEL into academic instruction in meaningful ways supports students' SEL development. However, research indicates that many high schools have not yet implemented programming that offers explicit SEL instruction and integrates SEL into academic instruction. This report provides an illustration of two Opportunity by Design (ObD) high schools in which practices for supporting students' SEL were implemented schoolwide and integrated into teachers' academic instruction. The ObD initiative was launched by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support the design and creation of a network of small, innovative high schools of choice in large, urban districts in the United States. These schools provide a unique perspective on what implementation of schoolwide, integrated, explicit SEL instruction can look like when it is a core design feature from school inception. The findings may provide valuable insight for leaders of other small high schools seeking to strengthen their own focus on SEL.

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Principals play a critical role in ensuring that teachers are prepared to support the nation's 6.7 million students with disabilities (SWD). Little is known about the supports for SWD that principals receive from their districts and other sources, but, as with teachers, principals report feeling inadequately prepared to support SWD. A recent RAND report found that only 12 percent reported that, when they began working as principals, they felt completely prepared to support the needs of SWD. The American Educator Panels asked a nationally representative sample of 1,679 principals a variety of questions — including questions about the extent to which they have sufficient support for serving SWD. This American Educator Panels Data Note provides principals' answers to these questions and recommendations for policymakers.

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presented new challenges for educators who teach students with disabilities (SWD). Research on the experiences of SWD during the pandemic is limited, but what is known suggests that SWD access to services and supports declined during the pandemic and that steeper learning losses are likely. Pandemic interruptions may be particularly problematic for secondary SWD because they missed out on critical preparation experiences while approaching the transition to college and career. Given these disruptions, it is critical that educators have the support and training they need to accelerate learning for SWD moving forward. In this report, the authors present national survey findings from secondary school principals and educators from the spring of the 2020–2021 school year, exploring educators' access to and use of supports for teaching SWD. The analysis focuses on the roles that teachers play (i.e., general or special educator) and the service delivery models that they use for teaching SWD. Despite the massive disruption brought about by the pandemic, many long-standing patterns in roles and support for educating SWD remained unchanged. These patterns shed light on the challenges that educators in secondary schools faced, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, that made effectively educating SWD in secondary schools so challenging during the pandemic.

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The Carnegie Corporation of New York's (CCNY) Opportunity by Design (ObD) initiative is intended to address the ambitious goal of preparing students for postsecondary success, based on the premise that promising high school reforms need to be integrated into a comprehensive school design and accompanied by appropriate, sustained levels of financial, policy, and implementation supports. The ObD initiative was founded in 2013 to support the design and launch of a network of small high schools of choice that focus on ten design principles, which, if fully implemented, should result in a school that functions differently from a traditional high school. Springpoint: Partners in School Design supports the ObD districts in using innovative school design to enable broader district reforms. RAND began conducting a five-year formative and summative evaluation of the ObD initiative in June 2014 when the first schools opened. This interim report describes findings from the first two years of implementation across two cohorts of schools. The findings from this report are based on principal, teacher, and student surveys; interviews with teachers, principals, and district staff and with leaders at CCNY and Springpoint; student focus groups; parent focus groups in four schools; classroom observations; and a sample of artifacts from each school. This report provides detailed examples of how the design principles are implemented in the ObD schools along with rich descriptions of facilitators and challenges. The report examines areas of similarities and differences across schools and districts, as well as comparisons across cohorts and over time. -- Provided by publisher

Common Core State Standards (Education) --- Education --- Educational evaluation --- Standards

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Since 2004, the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) has offered the Executive Development Program (EDP), a leadership program for sitting school principals that is typically delivered in two-day workshops once per month over 12 months. From its inception through 2018, 15,000 principals across 23 states have participated in the EDP. This report presents findings from part of RAND's evaluation of the EDP, focusing on how principals applied their EDP learning and coaching to their work as school leaders. The authors draw on a survey of 172 EDP participants, phone interviews of 74 principals, and nine in-depth case studies to examine what improvement efforts principals with EDP experience attempted in their schools and what strategies they applied to reach their goals.