Re-align resources (people, time, talent, energy and money) to support the instructional focus
Every school or district has at its disposal a finite amount of time, money, energy, talent and people.
For a district to perform at its highest potential, with students learning and achieving the goals set by the instructional focus, its resources must be put to use in the most effective ways possible.
At Focus On Results, we work with schools and districts to help them:
- Examine everything they have at their disposal — both financial and human capital.
- Use the instructional focus as the guide in deciding how to use a school's resources.
- Ensure that decisions in how to use resources are made with the needs of students and the goals of the instructional focus in mind.
- Constantly monitor how they use their resources, and make adjustments when necessary.
Results we've achieved
In the fall of 2000, Focus On Results began working with the Los Angeles schools as part of Reading By 9, a Los Angeles Times Foundation initiative to strengthen literacy education in the schools and strengthen the role of school principals in providing instructional leadership.
We helped several Los Angeles area schools re-align how they made use of their existing resources — time, people, money, and more — in support of the initiative. Since then, students and principals in those schools have shown impressive results:
- In their scores on the Academic Performance Index (API), 88 percent of the schools in the initiative made gains, compared to 78 percent of elementary schools statewide.
- Of the 88 percent of schools that made gains in their API, there was no significant change in the number of English language learners or low socio-economic status between the two years.
Those schools that saw the greatest gain in their API dramatically reduced the number of second- and third-grade students in the lowest quintiles.