Skip to content Skip to navigation

Schools of Opportunity: the inaugural winners (cites book edited by Prudence Carter)

May 7, 2015
Washington Post
The Schools of Opportunity project released a list of top schools in New York and Colorado that endeavor to enable all students to succeed. Schools are judged on how well they put into practice eleven principles outlined in the book “Closing the Opportunity Gap“ edited by Prudence Carter and Kevin Welner.
By 
Valerie Strauss

Last October I wrote about a pilot initiative to identify and recognize public high schools that seek to close opportunity gaps through practices “that build on students’ strengths” — not by inundating them with tests. Today the first winners are being announced, and in the coming days, the schools will be profiled on this blog.

The people behind the Schools of Opportunity project are Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in New York, and Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education who specializes in educational policy and law. Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, was named New York State High School Principal of the Year. She is taking early retirement at the end of the school year to advocate for public education. Welner is director of the National Education Policy Center at UC Boulder, which produces high-quality peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions.

Here are the winners from the pilot initiative in New York and Colorado:

By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

We are delighted to announce, exclusively on The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, the 17 recognized Schools of Opportunity for 2015. During this pilot year, all schools are in New York and Colorado, with five singled out for Gold-level recognition. These high schools use research-based practices to ensure that all students have rich opportunities to succeed. Some are working against great odds. All put students, not scores, first.

In the upcoming weeks in the Answer Sheet, we will describe these remarkable schools and what we can learn from them.

The Schools of Opportunity project, designed as a way to highlight schools that actively and equitably promote the success of all students, was piloted this school year in Colorado and New York, with plans to expand next year to include high schools nationwide. It is a project of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed in the CU-Boulder School of Education. The Ford Foundation and the NEA Foundation have both generously provided funding assistance for the Schools of Opportunity project.

                                                                                                                           ...

The recognition of these schools is based on 11 specific principles identified by experts in the 2013 book, “Closing the Opportunity Gap“ published by Oxford University Press, which Welner edited along with Stanford University Professor Prudence Carter. These principles include effective student and faculty support systems, outreach to the community, health and psychological support, judicious and fair discipline policies, little or no tracking, and high-quality teacher induction and mentoring programs.

Read the full  article in the Washington Post.

Prudence Carter is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Educationand Faculty Director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities.

Back to the Top