Episodes

“Let’s teach….But remember the context.”

On March 11, Malverne High School in Nassau County, New York, collected cell phones from their students in an attempt to help them become more mindful and focused in school. Within three days, as they prepared to shut down in the wake of Covid-19, “We were telling them, ‘connect, connect, connect,’” principal Dr. Vincent Romano says. All Malverne students were given iPads, and teachers have plunged into teaching their classes and are staying in touch with their students. But the school closure, ...

John Daniel, superintendent of Cottonwood Public Schools in rural Oklahoma, talks about the challenges of making sure students don’t fall behind when many of his students and teachers don’t have access to computers, Wi Fi, or even reliable cell phone service. The one good thing that might come out of this experience, Daniel said, is a public commitment to ensuring digital access to all of Oklahoma and the rest of the country.

To talk about the lessons we can learn from Valley Stream 30 (episode #6), Ed Trust brought together Jeffrey Howard, founder of The Efficacy Institute, Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap, and Josh Anisansel, a Long Island school administrator who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Valley Stream 30. In a wide-ranging conversation moderated by podcast creator Karin Chenoweth, Josh […]

Valley Stream 30 is just over the Nassau County line from Queens, New York, and has attracted a diverse population of African Americans, Hispanics, and relatively new immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It is in many ways a classic “white flight” district. Twenty years ago, 40 percent of the elementary school district was white. Today, only […]

To talk about the progress Seaford has made in the last few years (episode #4) 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. Moderated by podcast creator Karin Chenoweth, they had a wide-ranging discussion about reading […]

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. For years, three of its four elementary schools were among the lowest performing in the state. But Sean Reardon identified it as a district where African American students were learning at a […]

Panel Discussion of “Exposing and Learning From Expertise” with reading researcher Timothy Shanahan, University of Illinois-Chicago’s Steve Tozer, and Todd Hughes of the Choctaw Nation.

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 (Chicago, profiled in Season 1, is another). Since he identified it, Lane has improved its absolute achievement considerably. […]

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. The panel, moderated by ExtraOrdinary District creator Karin Chenoweth, had a wide-ranging discussion that went from the need for carefully designed early reading […]

We’re excited to announce season 2 of ExtraOrdinary Districts is coming in November 2019! Take a listen to this quick preview and then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Haven’t listened to Season 1 yet? That’s ok. Download the full season and get to bingeing!

Delaware’s first African American attorney went before the state’s first Catholic judge in 1952 to ask that Delaware’s schools be desegregated. The judge agreed that segregation should be dismantled but that only the U.S. Supreme Court had the power to do so. It did so on May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education. That September, 11 African American […]

Education Trust’s podcast, “ExtraOrdinary Districts,” illustrated that: school leaders who believe in the capacity of all children, no matter what their background, are critical to improving schools; and school leadership is a potential lever for chang...

Chicago Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson states that Chicago’s principal-development strategy is directly correlated to its improving graduation rates and test scores. Here, we visit the high school that she opened as principal, George Westinghouse Academy on the west side of Chicago, and meet principal Patrick McGill, who says, “The landscape of school leaders has completely changed in CPS over […]

How would Chicago school district know what worked and what didn’t? With foundation help, the University of Chicago launched the Consortium on School Research, where research superstars spent years studying what was going on in Chicago schools. At the same time, Chicago foundations, nonprofits organizations, and educators focused enormous attention on improving the teaching force. Little by little, they all […]

In 1987, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett flew into Chicago, declared it the “worst” school district in the country, and flew home, leaving Chicago residents stunned and angry. They had known things were bad, but being declared the worst helped galvanize support for the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act, which launched a generation’s worth of work to improve the […]

Although Steubenville’s third and fourth graders perform toward the top of the country, achievement tails off in fifth grade heading into middle school. We hear from Steubenville’s educators what they’re doing to change that.

Back in the late 1990s, Ohio adopted a law that said that fourth graders who couldn’t pass a reading test would have to be retained. Steubenville educators realized that some of their students would get caught up in that law and were determined not to let that happen. They researched some possible programs that might help and settled on Success […]

Superintendent Melinda Young has seen preschoolers who enter the Steubenville school district graduate from high school ready for college. This shows the power of schools to, in her words, change the path of poverty. Steubenville has long prized education as a path out of poverty, and long-time residents and students describe what that looks and feels like.

Superintendent Ash refocused Lexington school district on helping not the bussed-in Boston students but any student who needed extra help. He brought in nationally known trainers who helped teachers learn to collaborate and make better instructional de...

Once the educators in Lexington got a handle on how badly some of their students were doing, they threw themselves into fixing the problem. But some parents were surprised that there had never before been a system to identify students who needed help a...

Most wealthy, high-performing school districts have huge achievement gaps. And 10 years ago, Lexington, Massachusetts, did too. The students doing the worst? Mostly African American and Hispanic students who were traveling for hours — part of a long-ru...

Anyone who wants to identify “extraordinary districts” has a daunting challenge: The United States has more than 14,000 school districts and they vary widely. Some have hundreds of students; some have hundreds of thousands.

Across the nation, many school districts are asking themselves, “What can we do to better serve our students of color and those from low-income communities?” In Ed Trust’s new podcast, ExtraOrdinary Districts, writer-in-residence Karin Chenoweth explores that question by visiting ordinary school districts that are getting extraordinary results for historically underserved youth. Whether you’re a principal or parent, a superintendent or […]