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Spotlight On
The Career and Technical Education (CTE) Best Practices Guide for Educators and Local Partners, Big Ideas for Building Local College and Career Initiatives, collects some of the best of what Texas educators are doing to implement the College and Career Initiative of TEA’s CTE Unit. The initiative is designed to help Texas schools prepare students for secondary and postsecondary opportunities, career preparation and advancement, meaningful work, and active citizenship. The guide provides real-world examples of local initiatives featuring perspectives from students, counselors, and community partners. Best practices are organized around the eight steps featured in the CTE Implementation Guide, How to Ensure Student Success by Creating a Strong College and Career Education Program.  

Featured Best Practice

Pathways to College and Careers in Hidalgo ISD 
Hidalgo Early College High School, recognized by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top 100 high schools in the nation, is an outstanding example of how a district can unite college readiness with high-quality CTE training. Building from an established Career Pathways program and utilizing funding from the Communities Foundation of Texas and TEA, Hidalgo transformed its comprehensive high school into an early college campus committed to providing all Hidalgo students with college opportunities. All students in Grades 9–10 take a focused college-prep academic core that includes college experiences for everyone. By 11th grade, Hidalgo students can take academic college courses leading to transferrable college credits up to and including an associate degree or high-quality college-level CTE courses leading to national certification in vocational areas such as machining and metal trades, health and human services, automotive technology, and electronics and computer science. Hidalgo ISD, a rural district serving a predominately low-income (90.6%) and Hispanic (99.8%) population along the Texas/Mexico border, has demonstrated impressive results with its college readiness strategy. The four-year cohort graduation rate for the Class of 2009 was 90.9%, with 98% of graduates earning either a recommended or distinguished diploma. Almost half of Hidalgo students (45%) took AP exams, compared to a peer campus group in which only 18.6% took AP exams. Key strategies reflect best practices highlighted in the CTE implementation and best practices guides that promote student preparation for secondary and postsecondary success. These best practices include efforts that: 

• Span all grade levels
• Build seamless connections to college
• Develop strong higher education partnerships
• Offer quality professional development
• Create programs of study around the state’s 16 career clusters
• Enhance guidance and support
• Utilize achievement plans
• Provide extended learning opportunities

New Best Practices

The BPC is now including a new category of best practice summaries called Start-Up and Sustainability Profiles. The summaries below provide information about how two elementary campuses continued and expanded K–2 reading initiatives after initial funding ended. These campuses implemented reading program models with a high level of fidelity and then committed to sustaining and enhancing the initiatives, resulting in continued high student achievement.  

• Campuswide literacy coaching and collaboration at Iles Elementary result in sustained high reading achievement. This magnet elementary campus continued and expanded components of its K–2 reading initiative to develop a locally funded campuswide model. A campus literacy coach led ongoing site-based professional development and collaborative cross-grade level literacy teams to provide coherent instruction campuswide. Training for teachers in Grades 3–5 was designed to help teachers understand how to support struggling students who still needed to develop foundational reading skills.

• Shallowater Elementary shares best practices with reading demonstration site grant.  As a continuation of its Reading First initiative, the campus finely tuned its literacy workstations to provide daily, tailored differentiated instruction. A host of campus reading resources highlighting best practice strategies are available at http://schools.shallowaterisd.net/default.aspx?name=01.readinglinks.

New Research and Resources

Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (April 2010).  A new report from Carnegie Corporation of New York published by the Alliance for Excellent Education draws on a comprehensive statistical review of research to provide evidence-based information about how instructional practices in writing can improve reading skills and comprehension. Given the focus on writing and grammar by the State Board of Education in the most recently revised English, Language Arts and Reading TEKS, this report is timely. The report makes three core recommendations: (1) have students write about the texts they read; (2) teach students the writing skills and processes that go into creating text; and (3) increase how much students write. Writing to Read builds on the ideas and findings of the 2006 Alliance report Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High School Literacy.

New Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Practice Guides Released. In September 2010, the IES What Works Clearinghouse published two new practice guides:

• Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through 8th Grade
• Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

New TEA Dropout Information Homepage. TEA has recently created a homepage and section titled Dropout Information on the agency’s website. There you will find comprehensive information about how Texas and Texas public schools identify, prevent, and recover dropouts. Topics include:

• Proven Dropout Recovery and Prevention Strategies
• Dropout Prevention News and Success Stories
• What Others are Saying About Texas
• Texas Policies to Prevent Dropouts
• Policy Changes and the Graduation Rate  

Call for Best Practice Submissions

BPC is seeking best practice submissions related to the topic areas listed below:  

• Interventions for struggling learners and at-risk students  
• Effective middle school dropout prevention practices 
• Middle-to-high school transition strategies for at-risk students 
• Dropout recovery strategies to assist youth who, after previously leaving school, have re-enrolled to complete their high school diploma or an alternative path to college 
• Innovative strategies to recruit and retain qualified teachers, particularly in hard to serve areas, both rural and urban  

Please visit Submit a Best Practice to complete a BPC Share a Best Practice―Notice of Interest  form. For information on standards and criteria for determining best practices, please visit About BPC and Best Practice Standards.