The Education Department is out with details about how Title I School Improvement Grants would work. And it’s clear that federal ed officials have middle and high schools on their minds.
To get you started on this, take a look at my colleague Michele McNeil’s blog post today on the proposed regulations, and check back on our home page soon for her story about it.
You’ll see that EdSec Duncan is holding a bunch of money out there to turn around the lowest-performing schools (yes, we’ve written and written about this).
But if you check the feds’ notice of proposed regulations in the Federal Register, they specifically mention middle and high schools in “Tier II” of the categories that states must identify for these grants. (Page 3, for you follow-along types.)
Middle and high schools, always the overlooked children in ed reform? Maybe not.
The Ed Department put out a fact sheet on all this that you might find riveting reading (Hey! Don’t laugh. I said might.), and some examples of turnarounds they think have been successful. (Note references to Mastery Charter schools, a group that’s been working with middle schools in Philly, and Green Dot, which has been wrestling with a little high school in L.A. called Locke, that a few of us have, ahem, heard about.) The Ed Department’s overview is in its press release, too.