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| Advancing Creative Solutions in Education | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Education continues to be the most powerful vehicle for achieving the American promise and preserving our common ideals. The nation’s schools, colleges, and universities are among the few places where the artificial barriers of race, religion, class, and language can be transcended. Redeeming The American Promise (1995) |
| Promising Practices |
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Advancing fairness and excellence in education is not a simple business. It involves a complex process of change that must bring together good policies, promising practices, and persistent, effective people.
For this reason, improving education and educational opportunity in schools involves understanding first what can work and under what circumstances it can work. As Stanley Litow, Vice President for Corporate Community Relations at the IBM Corporation observes: "You can't change anything without being prepared to understand it. School governance, school finance and school personnel are issues that must be internalized and understood before - and not while - one is attempting a reform." At the same time, there are no "silver bullets." As IBM's Litow notes: "in education, initiating a small pilot or model school program seldom has led to systemic change. Unlike in other enterprises, 'benchmarking' (the process of identifying a successful best practice and replicating it) often involves moving against institutional barriers that can be eliminated in one or more small experiments but are thwarted when moving system wide." To assist in understanding what can work and how to enable both models of change and improved systems of education, SEF provides a listing of links to some of the best sites for promising practices relating to Southern education. SEF welcomes suggestions about other sites, programs, and resources for promising practices. |
| Section List Links |
| Best Practices Clearinghouse (Arizona K-12 Center)
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| Education Commission of the States
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| Just for the Kids
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| NGA - National Governors Association Center for Best Practices
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| Pathways to School Improvement: NCREL North Central Regional Educational Laboratory
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| Promising Practices Network
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| Southern Regional Education Board
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| The Alabama Best Practices Center
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| The Center for Best Practices in Early Childhood
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| U.S. State and Local Gateway
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| What Works Clearinghouse
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The Arizona K-12 Center is focused on Arizona but includes important links and information relating to national and Southern education. Among other objectives, the Center tries to identify and promote best practices relating to recruitment, preparation, certification, induction, retention, evaluation, and professional development of K-12 educators statewide in order to increase student achievement.
ECS Projects and Centers: ECS has several “projects and centers” that offer topical information on emerging developments and practices. 
This organization studies the highest performing schools to find out what works. Just for the Kids believes that an important step in school improvement is to investigate and learn from what successful schools are doing.
The NGA Center for Best Practices monitors best practices as a way to help find and implement innovative solutions to challenges facing the states. One focus of “best practices” is in the field of education.
Pathways synthesizes research, policy, and best practices on issues critical to educators engaged in school improvement. 
Best Practices: The Promising Practices Network (PPN) web site is not exclusively an “education” site. It highlights programs and practices that credible research indicates are effective in improving outcomes for children, youth, and families. The information offered is organized around three major areas: Proven and Promising Programs, Research in Brief, and Strengthening Service Delivery. 
SREB has a program that focuses on “Making Schools Work.” It is “a comprehensive school-improvement initiative aimed at raising student achievement in clusters of rural high schools and their feeder middle grades.” The effort combines the Southern Regional Education Board’s High Schools That Work research and emerging middle-grades efforts into an integrated whole-school improvement initiative.
The Center provides research and practical information about raising the quality of teaching and school leadership to improve student achievement in Alabama. While focused on Alabama, the site assembles information from around the nation as well as from across Alabama. 
The Center for Best Practices in Early Childhood provides research on innovative models in early childhood education and produces material that support best practices. 
FirstGov.gov is the official U.S. gateway to all government information. It includes current and archived data published on government web sites. This link provides a compilation of government sites on best practices in education that were web-published since the 1990s.
Best Practices: Provide educators, policymakers, researches, and the public with a central, independent, and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education.