Completion by Design, an initiative sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, seeks to raise community college completion rates for large numbers of students while containing college costs, maintaining open access, and ensuring the quality of college programs and credentials. The goal of this guide is to assist community college…

Suggests that a successful publications staff can thrive, digitally speaking, using Bill Gates' 12 key steps to reinvent the way the staff functions. Lists each rule and the parallel rule for scholastic journalism staffs. Notes two of the rules are use email and the Internet; and all staff members need a working knowledge of all areas of a…

The changing demands of the 21st century--and the students growing up in it--are generating fundamental challenges to historical assumptions about what education looks like. The challenge today is to provide a deeper level of personalized learning to each and every student so that all can achieve mastery of the Common Core standards and other…

The main purpose of this planning tool is to help community colleges facilitate productive conversations and develop systemwide plans to raise student completion rates substantially. The planning tool is initially targeted at colleges participating in the Completion by Design initiative. Based on these colleges' experiences and feedback, the…

This booklet provides a short review of the literature on the small-schools movement and describes the common features of effective small schools, as well as offering examples of two schools that have met with success. It gives a closer look at small-schools facilities and outlines six necessary considerations for local and state leaders. The text…

In 2003, education program officials at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked attorneys at the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education to explore legal issues affecting the establishment and operation of small high schools in Washington State. Although this guide will be of interest to small school advocates…

This document is part of a series of guides designed to help school district leaders address one of the toughest challenges in American education: dropout rates of 30 percent nationwide, 50 percent in many big cities, and 60 percent or more in the lowest-performing schools. This second guide in the series offers a detailed examination of the six…

This document is part of a series of guides designed to help school district leaders address one of the toughest challenges in American education: dropout rates of 30 percent nationwide, 50 percent in many big cities, and 60 percent or more in the lowest-performing schools. It includes tools for data analysts to drill down into the data and use…

This document is the first in a series of guides designed to help school district leaders address one of the toughest challenges in American education: dropout rates of 30 percent nationwide, 50 percent in many big cities, and 60 percent or more in the lowest-performing schools. It describes in abbreviated form how district leaders and…

Monitoring school budget expenditures is as important as budgeting. School boards should decide which broad financial policies will provide control of expenditures, what financial tools to use in monitoring expenditures, and what areas outside of the budget should be monitored. A board's financial policy ought to deal with the line item transfers,…

The selections in this sourcebook offer a blend of research-based principles and practical advice to the instructional consultant. The first section, Skills and Techniques of Instructional Consultation, contains: (1) The Interactions of Teaching Improvement (Kathleen T. Brink); (2) Instructional Consulting: A Guide for Developing Professional…