CSR Projects at LSS

The LSS projects under the priority area Building and Sustaining Comprehensive School Reform are:

• Comprehensive School Reform Technical Assistance in New Jersey, 2002-2003 The goal is to help school-based teams to productively assess their implementation of their CSR plan, decide on the next steps to improve implementation, put those plans into action, and move toward a system of continuous improvement.
• Comprehensive School Reform as a Reengineering Design in High Schools is a project designed to carry out a systematic program development and evaluation effort to extend a widely implemented research‑based CSR model to the high-school level.
• Implementation and Outcomes of Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Programs is a project centering on CSR’s emphasis on ways to transform high-poverty Title I schools into higher performing learning communities, including the building of a CSR research base that provides systematic information on the implementation of the legislative expectations and student outcomes of schools implementing CSR programs.
• The LSS Mega Demonstration Project is designed to coordinate and integrate, from LSS's most successful programmatic innovations, a consolidated project to advance the transformation of low-performing schools—all of which have demonstrated early success in implementing LSS’s CSR model—into high-performing learning communities.
• A PreK–16 Learning Community Model for Educational Improvement emphasizes alignment of school reform initiatives with efforts to improve teacher education programs at the university level.
• Promoting Knowledge Use: Connection with Policymakers is a targeted initiative designed to make sure that members of the region’s policymaking community are kept abreast of the latest policy information and procedural knowledge, to enable them to make decisions based on what is known to work best in educating our nation’s children.
• Raising Student Achievement: Labor–Management Policy Study —a collaborative project between LSS and the Public Sector Labor–Management Committee (PSLMC)—has the overall goal of evaluating implementation of a grant funded by The Ford Foundation to study the effects of district-level labor–management collaboration on student achievement.
• Secondary Analysis Studies of What Contributes to Improvements in Student Achievement consists of several series of secondary analyses designed to advance the procedural knowledge base on transforming low-performing urban and rural schools with high concentrations of students living in poverty into high-performing learning communities.
• State-Specific Assistance is a project focused on providing ongoing technical support to state agencies, and on improving policy design, management, and student learning.
• Unpacking Administrator Roles and Responsibilities in Standards-Based Reform is designed to address such questions as: What strategies and approaches are districts and schools using in responding to statewide curriculum standards? Why are these particular strategies and approaches being taken? What role is state leadership playing in standards implementation, and why is this particular approach being taken?