Technical Assistance & Consultation

State Capacity Building

We focus our efforts on assisting state departments of education in the following five areas:

• Pursuing SEA coherence: Assisting SEA leadership to create coherence between state policy, state resources, individual SEA departments, SEA assistance efforts, and districts in the service of substantive and systemic district capacity building and improvement efforts that leads to statewide improvement;
• Supporting SEA innovation: Supporting SEA leadership to create innovative structures to enable SEAs to actively pursue significant district capacity building and improvement efforts throughout their state;
• Building state capacity: Finding ways to harness statewide resources (including department of education resources and external partners) to benefit district and school improvement efforts;
• Formative evaluation: Providing SEAs with useful data regarding the effectiveness of their assistance efforts with districts and schools;
• Summative evaluation designs for the evaluation of state systems of support: Developing a summative evaluation system to determine the needs and growth of district capacity building and state-assisted school improvement efforts.

With the increased mandate to ensure that schools and districts are effectively supporting the achievement of all students, states have had to develop and pursue new strategies and efforts to foster and assist significant improvement efforts in schools and districts. In many states, despite these well-intentioned efforts, the number of schools and districts in need of improvement continue to grow as a result of both the ever-increasing benchmark for achievement as well as the fact that achievement is not improving in far too many schools and districts.

Given this reality, we partner with states and districts in helping them to seek coherence in their improvement efforts, and use a number of tools and processes toward that end.