Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Veteran superintendent brings turnaround model to schools nationwide

Under the new program, consultants help district staff who often “know what they need to do, but don’t know how to do it,” said Judy Zimny, vice president of Voyager Education Services.

Can turnaround results in one troubled school district be replicated in another? A new partnership between an education intervention provider and veteran superintendent Paul Vallas aims to find out by bringing Vallas’ proven reform model to more schools.

Through the Vallas Turnaround System, teams of educational consultants provide staff training and planning support to chronically underperforming schools. The program launched this summer in Indianapolis Public Schools.

Voyager Education Services, a division of Cambium Learning Group that focuses on academic interventions, announced in June an exclusive partnership with The Vallas Group Inc.…Read More

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Recovery School District Superintendent defends tenure

As the search goes on for his successor, Recovery School District head Paul Vallas can boast of improved test scores and a city wide school choice system with a “30 percent mobility rate,” or nearly a third of the population changing the educational options of their children to provide the best possible learning environment, the Louisiana Weekly reports. It is a far cry from the shattered school system that the Chicago native inherited after Hurricane Katrina.  “We had to open 11 FEMA modular campuses,” he told The Louisiana Weekly in an interview, explaining the buildings themselves were unsafe, often for years before Hurricane Katrina. Responding to critics that have claimed that Vallas’ citywide open-enrollment policy of school choice has effectively ended neighborhood schools, the RSD Superin­tendent explained, “Choice arose in New Orleans, in part, out of necessity…

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