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School Turnaround Initiatives

  • Success for All Students—Success for All Students is a new project based on a partnership between the Program of Research and Evaluation for Public Schools (PREPS) at Mississippi State University and Mississippi First.  With this partnership, PREPS and Mississippi First will identify, recognize, and learn from Mississippi’s highest-performing, highest-poverty schools in the hope that these lessons can inform school turnaround policy. The project is supported by Entergy and the Mississippi Department of Education. Results from the project will be available in December 2011. As the project progresses, Success for All Students will receive its own project page to keep the public updated on our findings.

    [June 2011 UPDATE] This summer, Mississippi First is hosting Policy and Advocacy Leadership Initiative (PALI) Fellow Erika Berry to design a school visit protocol for use in this project. Erika is a Teach For America alumna and current graduate student at Vanderbilt University. Her work will wrap up in August with the completion of the protocol.

  • 1003g School Improvement Grant—Mississippi First is proud to collaborate with the Office of School Recovery, the office within the Mississippi Department of Education tasked with oversight of the 1003g School Improvement Grant (SIG), a federal grant program for schools with an unprecedented level of funding and accountability. Since the re-design of the 1003g funding stream in 2010, Mississippi First has assisted MDE in developing the state's application for SIG dollars as well as designing Mississippi's application and rubric for local school districts wishing to compete for these dollars. In 2011, Mississippi First helped OSR dramatically improve the grant process for local school districts, including improving the application, rubric, training, and grant review. In FY2012, we will continue to support OSR in this important work.

  • Teacher and leader quality policy—Inevitably, conversations about school turnaround return to the need for a great teacher in every classroom and a great leader for every school and every district.  As a result, we are following all aspects of human capital policy in Mississippi and relevant national research.  We anticipate this area of our School Turnaround work to expand in the next several months.
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