Some of following publications and reports are downloadable from this site as PDF files. They require Adobe Acrobat Reader.
PUBLIC EDUCATION PROGRAM IN BRIEF
BPI's Public Education Program Information Brief
BPI PUBLICATIONS
Small Schools, Next Steps: Voices From The Field
Based on more than 70 interviews with Chicago educators, this 2002 report identifies a number of system-wide and school-based strategies to improve the environment for small schools, particularly around school-level autonomy.
CHICAGO SCHOOLS ALLIANCE PUBLICATIONS
School Visits: A Tool for School Improvement
This briefing paper provides a history of the PBI’s origins, how it works, an overview of the Visit week, and offers a comparison to other visit-based school evaluation strategies.
Reflections of Team Members on the Spring 2005 PBII Visits
Members of PBI School Visit teams powerfully reflect on what they learned from the Visit experience.
RESOURCES
Current News and Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools
Monthly print and online magazine dedicated to chronicling
and analyzing Chicago public school reform since 1990.
Consortium on Chicago School Research
A national model, the Consortium maintains a rich dataset on Chicago public schools and their students beginning with 1991. The Consortium produces incisive, reliable and change-making research. Kim Zalent, BPI's Director of Public Education Initiatives, serves on the Consortium's steering committee.
RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES
BPI's work through the Chicago Schools Alliance is grounded in research, including the following:
Hargreaves, Andrew and Dean Fink. Sustainable Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2005.
The result of a ten-year study on the sustainability of innovative schools, this book provies "a meal, not a menu" for practitioners and policymakers working to ensure that innovative schools remain successful over time. The Alliance has prepared a two-page summary.
Sebring, Penny B. and Elaine Allensworth, Anthony S. Byrk, John Q. Easton, and Stuart Luppescu. "The Essential Supports for School Improvement." Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research. 2006.
What do schools with high student performance have and do that others don't? Using data from Chicago public schools from 1990-1996, the authors identify five factors shared by high-performing schools: leadership, connection to parents and the community, a "student-centered learning climate", quality of the professional staff, and "ambitious instruction." These factors echo many of Hargreaves' and Fink's keys to sustainability.
Elmore, Richard. School Reform From The Inside Out: Policy, Practice, and Performance. Boston: Harvard Educational Review. 2004.
Why is school reform so difficult? In this collection of essays, Elmore analyzes barriers to successful school reform, including scaling-up reform from a handful of schools to the district level; the importance of linking external and school-level internal accountability systems, and the challenge of knowing the right thing to do.
