Education Northwest has been named one of 15 regional centers around the country that will provide high-impact training and technical assistance to state education agencies in the Northwest. The 5-year, $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will continue funding the Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center (NWRCC), which Education Northwest has operated since 1996. NWRCC serves Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington with a focus on educator effectiveness, school improvement, and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) implementation.

As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pointed out, NWRCC and the nation’s network of comprehensive centers “will help low-performing schools and districts close the achievement gap. They provide valuable support of the Administration's P–12 initiatives to ensure that every child is able to receive a high-quality education.”

In our 16-year history of providing NWRCC services, we’ve established strong partnerships with SEA leaders and staff. Idaho’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna noted, “With the support of the NWRCC, we have been able to plan and carry out several large-scale initiatives, including design of our statewide system of support—an effort that brought national attention to our state’s school improvement work.” Luna also credited the NWRCC with helping Idaho develop a framework for its administrator evaluation model, stating that “again, [this is] a complex undertaking that we could not have completed within a relatively short timeframe without high-level assistance.”

In the coming year, NWRCC specialists will work with Northwest states to meet a variety of needs, including:

• In Alaska, implementing recently adopted standards in English/language arts and mathematics, as well as developing tools and strategies to help districts with new state teacher evaluation regulations
• In Idaho, developing processes and tools to monitor and evaluate educator effectiveness, and to implement CCSS
• In Montana, building rigorous instructional pathways that support the successful transition of all students from secondary education to college without the need for remediation; and identifying, recruiting, developing, and retaining highly effective teachers and leaders
• In Oregon, continuing to develop the state’s educator effectiveness systems and supporting the Oregon Continuous Improvement Network that provides services to low-performing schools
• In Washington, examining programs supported by Title I and Learning Assistance Program (LAP) funds to identify promising school-level practices for improving student outcomes; and evaluating the impact of programs to improve teacher and principal effectiveness

In addition, NWRCC will lead two regional projects:

• Helping SEAs develop the capacity to implement and monitor large-scale initiatives
• Establishing Rural School-to-School Networked Communities to identify and implement approaches to improving student outcomes in rural schools with a variety of special populations

NWRCC Director Danette Parsley states, “We look forward to providing our states with the top-quality training and technical assistance they’ve appreciated from us in the past and working collaboratively in the future to improve student outcomes.”

Tweet