Central High makes student achievement, tech access its top priorities

Central High's best ed-tech advice? "Ensure that everything you do is student-centered."

Philadelphia’s Central High School focuses on making its technology initiatives student-centered, with an emphasis on boosting achievement—and this focus has paid off in a big way.

Administrators, teachers, students, and parents are able to able to access grades, news, and pertinent communications instantly, and students have access to a wide range of applications to advance their learning. By strengthening the home-school connection, Central High is enhancing students’ chances of success.

For these reasons, Central High was chosen as our “eSchool of the Month” for October. Here, Brian Howland, a teacher and technology committee member, describes some of the school’s accomplishments and its keys to success.…Read More

What’s really wrong with ‘parent trigger’ laws

“Parent trigger” laws, first passed in California and then elsewhere in the country, typically state that over 50 percent of the parents in a school or schools “feeding into” that school can sign a petition demanding that the district either convert the school into a charter, close it, hire a new principal, or bring in new staff, says Larry Ferlazzo, English teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California, for the Washington Post. The first attempt at implementing the law—in the predominantly low-income city of Compton in southern California—was unsuccessful…

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