Type Of Content: Podcast

To talk about the progress Seaford has made in the last few years Ed Trust brought together Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, author Richard Kahlenberg, and Sharon Brittingham, a Seaford native who is a former principal and today coaches principals throughout Delaware.

Seaford, Delaware, was the “Nylon Capital of the World” until DuPont closed its plant. Today it has twice the rate of poverty as the rest of the state.

A small, kindergarten-through-8th-grade district in rural Oklahoma, Lane was identified by Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, as one of the few districts in the country that “grow” its students almost six academic years in five calendar years.

To kick off Season 2 of ExtraOrdinary Districts, we brought together an all-star panel to discuss school district improvement. Janice Jackson, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Harvard University’s Ronald F. Ferguson, and University of Michigan’s Nell Duke.

In season two we travel to two rural districts and one suburban district to talk with thoughtful educators about the hard work they have put in to develop systems and ways of operating to continuously improve the learning of students.

To mark the 65th anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education ruling, Ed Trust created a special edition of ExtraOrdinary Districts.

One of the key lessons that emerged in Education Trust’s podcast, “ExtraOrdinary Districts,” is that improvement requires leadership at the school level.

One of the districts that surprised Sean Reardon the most is Chicago – the nation’s third largest district with about 400,000 students.

What are they doing in Steubenville do be so high performing in elementary school? And how are they addressing the fact that their students don’t continue to perform at the top of the country as they move into secondary grades?