Report on Successful Washington High Schools From Just For the Kids

The Just for the Kids website has done a series of reports on successful high schools in different states; their report on Washington is neat reading for anyone who cares about the high school reform movement. The schools (with districts) they identified as getting particularly good results:

Friday Harbor HS, San Juan Island
Inglemoor HS, Northshore
Lewis and Clark, Spokane
Nathan Hale HS, Seattle
Olympia HS, Olympia

The only personal knowledge I have of any of these schools is that Lewis and Clark has a great building (the OSPI Summer Institute was there last year), and I took my SATs at Olympia HS many, many moons ago.

JFTK has identified several different traits of effective schools, and one of the most interesting sections of the report is where they talk with different teachers about how their schools match up with these traits. There’s a heavy emphasis throughout on collaboration, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. It’s light reading, but useful.

One term that I learned from the report was something called a “critical friends group”, which was new to me. As far as I can tell it’s just another term for a professional learning community, but I’ll need to poke around on the internet some to see just what it entails. The name is a bit off-putting (critical friends?), but if it tells me something new about how to work PLCs I’m all for it.