What Is the Priority Schools Campaign?

You wouldn’t know it from the media, but across the country, educators are partnering with parents, communities, businesses, and their Associations to positively transform their schools—and NEA’s Priority Schools Campaign is supporting and promoting their efforts. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel introduces the campaign, shares success stories, and asks members to share how they’re working with their communities to improve their schools.

Who is involved with NEA’s Priority Schools Campaign?
Short answer: everyone who cares about public schools. National Education Association members working in lower-performing schools, NEA staff, state affiliates and locals, parents, community leaders, education advocates, policy makers, and businesses.

What is the Priority Schools Campaign (PSC)?
The Priority Schools Campaign grew out of a mandate from NEA’s annual Representative Assembly, where more than 9,000 delegates voted to focus resources on informing and engaging members in collaborative work to transform lower-performing schools, our priority schools. The campaign supports:

• School transformation approaches that involve educators, communities and policymakers in state capitols, in Congress and in the Obama administration.
• Collaboration on innovative programs to measure student success and teacher quality.
• Attracting and keeping the best educators and necessary resources for the schools of greatest need.

When will we see the transformations take place?
Some schools and districts have already brought educators, administrators, policymakers and their communities together to implement innovative plans to boost student achievement. Other schools are waiting to receive funds from the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The SIG program provides funding to schools that “have the greatest need…and demonstrate the strongest commitment to use the funds to raise significantly the achievement of their students.”

Where are these priority schools?
Priority schools can be found in every state. The Priority Schools Campaign will be sharing examples and stories from all over the country of strong leadership, stable and well-trained staff and partnerships that are changing the status quo in their schools. To share how priority schools are being improved in your community, leave a comment in the “Share Your Story” section of the PSC website.

Why is NEA doing this?
NEA is taking major responsibility for priority schools, examining everything we do — refining it, changing it, throwing out what hasn’t worked, embracing new ways of working.  We know that great teachers and support professionals, with the right policy supports and resources, are the ideal agents of permanent change. And we don’t want to look back in 10 years and say, ‘well, we talked about this problem back in 2010, but we never did anything about it.’ NEA is grounded in the organization’s core commitment to a great public school for every student, and that’s why transforming low-performing schools is a high priority for our 3.2 million members.

How can I keep up with Priority Schools Campaign news?
Aside from updating http://neapriorityschools.org with all the latest news, we’re also posting on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Related posts:

1. NEA Priority Schools Campaign: Disrupting the Status Quo
2. Priority Schools Campaign – National Conference Materials
3. Education Leaders Plan Collaboration on Priority Schools
4. Hope into Action – Click to Share A Story of School Improvement
5. Priority Schools Campaign Pledge Card