The Nellie Mae Education Foundation has witnessed a groundswell of research-based practices that are transforming the education landscape nation-wide. Here are a few related and other trends that show promising approaches and new routes forward to excellence and equity.

*Accountability and assessment: A wave of policy change is driving our current focus on accountability and assessment, such as the development of common standards, waivers that relieve states of NCLB requirements, and the reauthorization of ESEA. It has never been more critical to remodel our education system to meet the demands of a complex world, but updating our tests is only the beginning. We need to move beyond technical fixes that focus on incentives and compliance in an attempt to influence individual behavior. If we invest our ingenuity and resources into changing our culture—rather than incrementally changing our practices—we would achieve bigger and better results.

*Personalized and student-centered approaches: Interest in more personalized approaches—such as competency education—is bubbling up in school districts across the country. This shift is reinforced by an explosion of adaptive educational technology, the priorities of the District Race to the Top, and new state policies that allow credits to be awarded based on proficiency of subject matter. Supported by scientific research about how students learn—competency education is characterized by rigorous, equitable and differentiated learning opportunities, flexible and varied uses of time and learning environments, self-pacing, and demonstrated mastery of skills and knowledge. A growing number of schools and initiatives like CompetencyWorks are ahead of the curve in advancing competency-based models of teaching and learning.

*Public engagement: Remodeling our education system to sustain a thriving democracy requires a new era of localized public engagement. Systems change is typically dictated by people who look at, govern, and direct learning, but a powerful asset remains largely untapped: our communities. The result is a persistent disconnect between local school leadership and their customers—students, parents and community leaders. To create new routes forward, we have to find bolder ways to engage the public more directly and create a shared understanding about how well our schools are doing, and the depth of change needed to make a difference.

In many ways, our nation’s education system is like an old house. It’s not enough to add a new coat of paint or update the appliances—the underlying problems will still exist down to the weight-bearing walls. True change necessitates more thoughtful engagement of the various architects and residents of that house. Framing education reform as an economic good is important, but we need to deepen public understanding to move toward a broader social good: helping all of our nation’s learners to succeed.

Our editor makes an astute observation when she writes that “…parents are agitating for more control over where their kids go to school. They want alternatives to the bad schools.”

Reform has not only created change in the classroom, it has created change in the living room, too. But as the phrase “agitating for more control” indicates, reform has also encouraged families to take an adversarial stance against their schools.

This is more than a problem, it’s a lost opportunity. Parents and educators share the same interest: promoting the academic growth and overall well-being of the children in thier care. Families and schools should be allies not enemies.

The growing division between families and educators serves no one. It also squanders an historic opportunity to address the challenges of reform through collaborative schooling.

I don’t know a single teacher who doesn’t appreciate support from parents at home. Nor have I ever met a parent who didn’t appreciate the effort teachers make to address the individual needs of their children.

But instead of working together, two powerful groups of adults are choosing to work at odds—at the expense of their own children.

Improving this situation requires the following:

(1) Parents increasing their ownership of student academic achievement by recognizing that they are their children’s first and most influential teachers. Parents may not know the curriculum or the pedagogy, but they know their kids better than anyone else, and they know what they want for their kids academically. By working together as a family to identify and articulate specific and positive academic values, by practicing these values as a part of daily life, by communicating these values to the educators who work with their children, and by taking a strengths-based view of academic progress in relation to these values, family-school relationships improve and so do academic outcomes for kids.

(2) Teachers articulating their positive academic values, too, and sharing them explicitly with students and their families. When teachers and parents communicate and promote positive academic values, they uncover the common ground on which they can work together to help the children they share reach their full potential. When everyone adopts a strengths-based approach, kids develop patterns of success instead of racking up racking up records of failure. Much of what we have communicated to kids through schools is what we don’t want them to do or how we don’t want them to act. This deficit-based approach is an unfortunate historical artifact of education culture, one we have only to find ourselves on the other end of to know how destructive it is. Strengths-based approaches to academic achievement focus more on what kids are doing well than on what they are doing poorly. This encourages kids to adopt habits of heart and mind consistent with the best of who they are and who we want them to become.

(3) Schools creating strengths-based collaborative schooling programs. These efforts need not be time-consuming or expensive. But they must be pervasive. A small investment in collaborative schooling pays large dividends. The responsibility for the academic success of children is a shared responsibility, and schools are the natural gathering place for that sharing to occur.

The animus between families and educators hasn’t reached Hatfield and McCoy status yet. But the two groups have definitely developed the habit of ignoring each other at best and acting out what they perceive to be their mutual opposition at worst. Fashionalbe pareent education "movements" like parent advocacy, parent engagement, and parent empowerment—as well as legislative structures like parent trigger laws have a bellicose cast and a combative intent that do not serve the interests of anyone very well.

Collaboration, not conflict, makes more sense to me.

Will every family conscientiously and consistently support the academic development of their children? No. Will every educator reach out to the families of the children they teach to discover the common ground that exists between them? No. Does this mean collaborative schooling is a non-starter? To the contrary, it means we have to start now doing more of it and doing it much better.

Just as we all benefit when we adopt a strengths-based approach to the education of our children at home and at school, so must we take this same view toward family and school collaboration. This means starting where we are even if it’s not where we would hope to be. If 30 parents and three teachers see the value of this idea, schools will support it. At the same time, schools will support getting that fourth teacher on board and 40 parents in the room to talk constructively about the academic lives of the children both groups care so much about.

Educating children is not someone else’s responsibility. It is less useful for parents to demand better schools than it is to take an active role in bettering them. Schools will improve as more educators take similar positive action.

In frustration, many parents I work with ask me, “What do you do with teachers who just don’t care?” My answer, based on the 20,000 teachers I’ve worked with, is always the same: “If I ever find one, I’ll let you know.” Likewise, teachers all too often assume a lack of commitment on the part of parents regarding the academic development of their kids. Having worked for almost 20 years in classrooms and living rooms all over the country, what I see most often are two groups of people who want the very same things but who simply don’t communicate directly about what is most important to them or work cooperatively to reach the goals they share.

We can create new schools. We can hire new teachers. We can adopt new curriculum, set higher standards, and make kids take tougher tests. We can also create stronger support systems outside of education for families and their children. But the gains we make in one area will be canceled out by the losses we suffer in others until we make a commitment to collaborative schooling.

Tuesday night’s re-election of President Obama ensures that he and his administration will have four more years to extend their ambitious vision to improve education across the country.

To be sure, a second term Obama Administration has a lot of hurdles to face, including – a Democratic controlled Senate and a Republican controlled House that need to come together to re-authorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as well as an impending federal funding crisis that could have detrimental consequences for the Department of Education budget.

The way I see it, the opportunities exceed the challenges. The Obama Administration made big bets during the first term and are unlikely to change course now – and it’s doubtful that the Department of Education will see the same infusion of resources it received in 2009. Rather than going back to the drawing board, they’ll carry through the theme of the campaign and keep moving forward, focused on implementing the big ideas: (1) rigorous standards and assessments that prepare students to be college- and career-ready, (2) building data systems that measure student growth and success, (3) ensuring effective teachers and principals, and (4) turning around the lowest performing schools in the country.

So how do they keep the momentum going?

Go all in on school leadership. The principal is the linchpin to the successful implementation of the four core educational assurances that undergird the Obama/Duncan vision for educational success. Principals are responsible for implementing new standards and assessments (Common Core or state-based). They are a leading consumer of new data systems that track and report on student growth as well as teacher effectiveness, using data to make strategic decisions and facilitating data-driven instruction. Principals are critical to recruiting, developing, evaluating, supporting, and retaining the best teachers – ninety-seven percent of teachers say that supportive leadership is necessary to keep good teachers in their schools—more than any other factor.[1] Finally, principals are on the front lines to turn schools around by developing an achievement-based culture, ensuring rigorous teaching and learning, and building and managing a high-quality staff. On average, a principal accounts for 25 percent of a school’s total impact on student achievement, significant for a single individual and the second greatest after the impact of the teacher.

Any way you slice it, principals are the next best bet to make good on the promise of education reform. Dedicated to understanding the challenges that principals face on the ground, Secretary Duncan and dozens of senior Department of Education staff recently spent three days visiting schools across the country to shadow effective school leaders. “Great school leaders are key to students receiving a high-quality education and teachers feeling supported and empowered in their work,” said Secretary Duncan. “Outstanding principals build school cultures focused on learning and high expectations, where all students can reach their full potential. Every great school has a great leader.”

After her visits, Deputy Chief of Staff Tyra Mariani succinctly captured the importance of leadership, writing, “We won’t get a highly effective teacher corps unless we have principals as instructional leaders who are surrounded by and supporting strong teacher leaders who in turn help teachers get better.”

At New Leaders, our vision for a strong principal corps is to have school leaders across the country that ensure quality teaching in every classroom, create positive school cultures, and build and retain great staffs. We must also build this leadership capacity in a variety of roles at the school level. To bring this vision of leadership to life, we recommend that the Department:

• Sharpen the Focus on Leadership – Encourage states and districts to invest the time, focus, and resources necessary to generate a principal corps that can successfully lead in this new era of reform.
• Ensure a Strong Pipeline of Future Leaders – The current system of principal preparation is broken – there is an abundance of certified administrators, but a huge shortage of leaders with the necessary competencies needed to help schools succeed. We must change the incentives and expectations for principal preparation and therefore the quality of leaders trained.
• Invest in Systems to Evaluate and Develop Current Leaders – In addition to building a strong pipeline for the future, it’s important to raise expectations for the current principal corps, identify areas for improvement, and provide resources for their development.

Betting big on school leadership lets the Administration double down on the investments (and progress) of the past four years. Effective principals are critical to student success and investing in them will help ensure bright futures for the next generation.

[1] Scholastic Inc. (2012). Primary sources: America’s teachers on the teaching profession. New York, NY: Scholastic and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What are the big education topics that will surface for the next four years? In truth, we can expect more of the same. Little has changed. We have the same President, the same Secretary of Education, the same basic Congress, and the same national power dynamics shaping the larger discourse. So we’ll likely continue to see a great reliance on test-based accountability systems and on various policies rooted in school choice mechanisms.

For more than a decade, politics have pointed toward one direction and evidence has pointed toward another. Policy has heeded the politics and shunned the evidence. We can hope this will change, but we shouldn’t expect it.

Yet we should also acknowledge that President Obama has stressed how important evidence is to him. So what would a research-based shift in policy look like? At the most basic level, it would involve a multi-level understanding of accountability. Yes, schools and teachers and students should be accountable. But so should those with greater power and authority.

A third-grade teacher doesn’t have the power to ensure that her students received high-quality preschool four years earlier. Nor does she have the power to determine class size at her school or to find funding for repairs to the school’s heating or air-conditioning system. In fact, teachers generally have no authority over resource levels at their schools. That’s the job of politicians and other policy makers – the same people who have set up rigid systems to hold OTHER people accountable.

Fundamentally, what research evidence tells us about education is that students learn when they have opportunities to learn. The richer the opportunities, the better the outcomes. That’s why a charter school (or a neighborhood school or a private school) with extra resources is likely to yield better outcomes than a charter school (etc.) operating with ‘normal’ or reduced resources. That’s why Obamacare and the improving economy will probably do more to increase education results than the major initiatives that have come out of the Dept. of Education. Sound health care and jobs for one’s parents are more crucial for providing opportunities to learn than is changing governance structures in an ineffectual attempt at school turn-around.

Having said that, there are two policies that the Dept. of Education has pursued, that can be strengthened in the second term, and that hold potential to meaningfully increase opportunities to learn: Promise Neighborhoods and the Early Learning Challenge. The former approach is soundly grounded in decades of research, although outcome evaluations of the specific new programs have yet to establish their efficacy. The administration would be wise to continue these programs and the related research. The latter approach – expansion of high-quality early childhood education – has long been understood by researchers as among the best ways to increase children’s academic and life-chances outcomes, with economic benefits far exceeding the costs.

The administration has been given a second chance. It can use the next four years to develop these and additional efforts to address the roots of national problems, focusing on approaches such as integration of housing and schooling, safe and opportunity-rich communities, jobs programs and after-school programs, as well as school-level policies such as high-quality and sustained teacher-induction programs. I have indeed heard Secretary Duncan speak more and more of opportunities to learn. If his guide star does become opportunity to learn, not just measurement and accountability or school choice, the administration will be able to look back in 2016 and point to genuine progress.