Join with CEPS by signing on in support of the call for Education Secretary Arne Duncan to adopt the CEPS Sustainable Success Model.
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PETITION
We, the undersigned, join CEPS in calling for Secretary Arne Duncan to use his regulatory authority to offer another option – the Sustainable Success Model - to address our state’s and nation’s lowest-performing schools – “the turnaround schools”. We demand that parents, students and communities play a meaningful role in deciding what happens to our schools.
The Honorable Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education Building
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20202
Dear Secretary Duncan:
We applaud the Department of Education, and the Obama Administration for your continued focus on education, particularly on the need to improve the nation’s lowest-performing schools. Every day, hundreds of thousands of students across the country attend schools that lack critical resources necessary to ensure that students can succeed and thrive.
For nearly four years, Congress has struggled to come to agreement on a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Despite widespread agreement that many provisions of the current law have been counter-productive, the debate continues. In the face of this inaction, the Department of Education is now forced to consider waivers to allow states and districts to move ahead with school reform plans.
A key focus for us is the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program. SIG funds some of the nation’s lowest performing schools to implement one of four intervention models aimed at improving student outcomes. Under current SIG regulations, school districts with persistently low-performing schools can choose to close some of those schools, convert them to charters, or to replace the school’s staff and leadership.
While some schools may require such structural change, we believe that in many instances, structural change is not sufficient to create lasting improvement. For some schools, real, sustainable change must be built, brick-by-brick, from the ground-up.
Communities for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS), a coalition of 35 community-based organizations in low-income communities of color across the country has developed the framework for what we believe offers such a brick-by-brick approach. It’s called the Sustainable Success Model.
We are joining with CEPS to respectfully request that you consider using your power to initiate regulatory reforms to ESEA, allowing districts to offer the Sustainable Success Model.
The Sustainable Success Model requires school districts to make a deep and lasting commitment to school improvement. It requires them to: 1) undertake a comprehensive needs assessment—led by parents, teachers and communities—so that local solutions are tailored to local problems, 2) transform the schools instructional program and structure through the implementation of research-based strategies, 3) address essential social, emotional and physical needs of students, and 4) recognize parent, student and community leadership as key to sustainable student success. We believe that this Sustainable Success Model offers the promise of comprehensive and lasting improvement in some of our nation’s most troubled schools.
Implementing the Sustainable Success Model with fidelity will not be easy. In fact, this model demands much more from schools and districts. Rather than simply changing the management and staff of a school, the Sustainable Success Model demands that the school community work together to assess a school’s unique challenges, design and implement a new academic culture that includes extended time and rigorous instructional strategies, and cobble together a network of supports to meet the social, medical and academic needs of its students and their families.
Creating lasting change in our nation’s most troubled schools is a difficult challenge. We know that you and the Administration are deeply committed to change. We hope that you will incorporate the CEPS’ Sustainable Success Model into regulation, and allow those schools and districts that are ready to take on the process of demanding, comprehensive reform to adopt this model of school transformation.
