Reforming High Schools: Tools to Help Promote Change

FREE Conference

America's high schools are charged with the responsibility of educating millions of students, and thus their role is essential to our country’s vitality. Their centrality requires a regular and systematic evaluation of their effectiveness, and recent initiatives to address how high schools can do a better job of educating our nation’s youth is a major part of current education policy discussions. Many of these reform initiatives call for sweeping and often times controversial changes and paradigm shifts that may or may not be easily supported by individual high schools' existing education infrastructure or by the communities that they serve.

Researchers and practitioners alike agree that unless the system is set up to support the changes that are ultimately decided upon, reform efforts will be fruitless. This conference will provide information on the issues associated with high school reform and how to adapt our high school system to help support systematic policy changes. Innovative ways to assess progress in schools as well as methods to increase collaboration in and amongst schools will be addressed.

This conference is designed in conjunction with the latest journal issue of The Future of Children "America's High Schools." This issue, due to be released in March 2009, shines a spotlight on high schools, focusing mainly on the overarching challenges that all high schools face including institutional reform, transitioning, curriculum and instruction, school drop-outs and access to higher education.

6 Professional Development Hours Awarded for Participation