Current events and perspectives from the Eskolta team
Eskolta celebrates six years co-hosting the NYC Transfer School Conference
On June 9, 2016, Eskolta founder and executive director Michael Rothman celebrated the organization’s sixth annual transfer school conference. Successfully organized and funded in partnership with the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary...
Achieving School Success through a Distributed Leadership Approach
“When teachers are helping other teachers, it’s a little bit of a different feeling than when an administrator is working with a teacher. There’s a little more trust there. ” Much of Eskolta’s work focuses on helping New York City educators share best practices within...
Eskolta’s Leading Role at 2016 Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education
Over 1,000 attendees from across the country gathered in San Francisco for the third annual Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Summit on Improvement in Education. This summit, the largest to date, offered practitioners, researchers, and district and...
What works to make teacher leaders stay committed to education? Updates on Eskolta Studies of Teacher Leadership in New York City
Since Eskolta’s founding, we have worked extensively with the New York City Department of Education to understand the impact of City initiatives and policies on educators in the City. Our research study on a citywide initiative to increase teacher leadership...
Eskolta Releases 2015 Eskolta Annual Report
The staff and leadership team of Eskolta School Research and Design are pleased to announce the release of our 2015 annual report. In our collection of data and writing of this year’s report, we have learned many lessons in how to best convey the story of Eskolta’s...
New Eskolta Case Study Release
"They’ve heard it a million times: ‘Yeah, you’re going to say I’m smart; I’ve got the potential.’ They don’t believe it, and the ones that do don’t get how it translates. When you use effort language, it sends the message that it’s a process, that you’re not finished...
Interview with Michael Wolach, Eskolta Fellow 2016
As part of Eskolta’s inaugural fellowship, teacher leader Michael Wolach is honing his skills in project management, data collection and analysis, and design principles. Though this is his first foray in formally studying those skills with Eskolta, his exposure to our...
Eskolta Presents at the National Dropout Prevention Conference
Districts, educators, and researchers from around the country gathered in Austin, Texas this past October to share best practices and current thinking at the Annual Conference of the National Dropout Prevention Conference. The conference was the nation’s largest...
Metacognitive Learning at Metropolitan Diploma Plus
Metacognition, the awareness of and reflection on one’s own thinking process, is critical to student success. It is critical to adult success too. The story of Eskolta’s work with Metropolitan Diploma Plus is a story of how metacognition is helping schools improve....
Launch of Eskolta Fellows Program
This fall, Eskolta announced a new fellowship program designed to train school and district-based educators to lead the school change process. Through this program, a cohort of Eskolta Fellows is engaging in a unique learning experience focused on the methods and...
The Problem with Accountability
Nine years ago, I and others working with transfer schools sat with the NYC Department of Education staff responsible for creating the first progress reports. They generously listened to feedback on how to assess transfer schools and let the progress report evolve...
Three Questions We Have to Answer to Help Educators Succeed
After nine years of teaching, my wife gave up on the profession a few years ago and made a career change. She is now the deputy director of a government delegation to the United States, meeting with diplomats, engineering treaties, and giving speeches at the United...
In Schools We Trust…
Recently, the New York City Department of Education added a simple but critical element into its capacity framework for schools: Trust. Trust, of course, is important for more than only schools. As the philosopher Sissela Bok wrote: “Whatever matters to human beings,...
School Accountability after 2014
What does the year 2014 matter in the history of public education? For those who are keeping score, this is the year, according to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), when every student in America was supposed to have achieved proficiency. According to the law, which...