Research & Development | Leadership Public Schools

Leadership Public Schools is an entrepreneurial “research and development” organization seeking solutions for the most difficult issues in public education. As in most urban high schools, over half of LPS 9th graders enter high school reading significantly below grade level.  This stark reality demands innovative responses. LPS is leveraging the design processes of the private sector and the power of partnerships to develop solutions that are uniformly rigorous, yet flexible enough to address individual student needs.

Leveraging Open Educational Resources to Increase Student Achievement and Teacher Professionalism
A Case Study of Leadership Public Schools For the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

ExitTicket.org
ExitTicket is an interactive, real-time, "exit ticket" style classroom question and feedback system designed to accelerate student and teacher performance. ExitTicket runs on all smartphones and tablets, enabling students and teachers to get real time feedback on their thinking at any time during the class. Teachers efficiently pull from a library of questions or create their own on-the-fly "Quickets!" to enhance learning and differentiation in their lessons.

CK-12/LPS “College Access Readers"

LPS and the CK-12 Foundation are creating a line of free, open-source, online curriculum resources tailored to address one of the most pressing issues in urban education today: how to teach rigorous content and literacy skills simultaneously. By concurrently teaching reading and biology, for instance, low-skilled students can both improve their academic literacy and master critical content. Significant supports such as text-to-speech technology, embedded video clips and translations enable underprepared students to access college preparatory coursework – a necessity if the dream of college is to become a reality. 

College Access Curriculum Resources

The first publication of this partnership, “An Introduction to College Access Readers” describes the rationale, research and strategies of this initiative.  The CK-12/LPS “College Access Readers” are expected to be in use in at least 50 high schools in California and across the nation in 2011
Flexmath by Todd McPeak, CK-12 Math Specialist and former LPS Math Curriculum Specialist
College Access Reader: Algebra
Flexmath is a highly successful, web-based, interactive Algebra program with individualized practice and backfill support for numeracy skills that moved students 33 percentile points on the California Standards Test (CST). College Access Reader: Algebra 1 is CK-12 Algebra flexed to align with Flexmath and includes embedded literacy supports.

Personalized Pathways to College

The Personalized Pathways to College approach provides teachers the tools they need to accelerate student learning. By collecting and analyzing individual student data on a daily and weekly basis they are able to address the particular needs of each student both during class and in after-school tutorials. The entire personalized learning program is designed with the student as a KEY audience. The goal is to help students understand where they are on the path to college and realize that their education is in their hands.