Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools

Schools across the United States and Canada are disrupting the adverse effects of poverty and supporting students in ways that enable them to succeed in school and in life.

In this second edition, Parrett and Budge show you how your school can achieve similar results. Expanding on their original framework's still-critical concepts of actions and school culture, they incorporate new insights for addressing equity, trauma, and social-emotional learning. These fresh perspectives combine with lessons learned from 12 additional high-poverty, high-performing schools to form the updated and enhanced Framework for Collective Action.

Emphasizing students' social, emotional, and academic learning as the hub for all action in high-performing, high-poverty schools, the authors describe how educators can work within the expanded Framework to address the needs of all students, but particularly those who live in poverty.

Equipped with the Framework and a plethora of tools to build collective efficacy (self-assessments, high-leverage questions, action advice, and more), school and district leaders--as well as teachers, teacher leaders, instructional coaches, and other staff--can close persistent opportunity gaps and reverse longstanding patterns of low achievement.

William H. Parrett has received international recognition for his work in school improvement related to children and adolescents who live in poverty. He has coauthored nine books; three recent books are bestsellers. The award-winning and best-selling first edition of this book, written with Kathleen Budge, guides lasting improvement and student success in high-poverty schools. He and Budge also cowrote Disrupting Poverty: Five Powerful Classroom Practices. As director of the Boise State University Center for School Improvement and Policy Studies (since 1996), Parrett coordinates funded projects and school improvement initiatives that exceed $5 million a year. His speaking engagements and work spans 44 states and 10 nations. Throughout his career, Parrett has worked to improve the educational achievement of all children and youth, particularly those less advantaged. These efforts have positively affected the lives of thousands of young people, many of whom live in poverty.

Kathleen M. Budge has 26 years of experience as a teacher and administrator plus 10 years dedicated to bridging the gap between the university and the teaching profession. She is an associate professor of Educational Leadership and chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Department at Boise State University, where her research focuses on poverty, rural education, school improvement, and leadership development. Budge is the coauthor of the award-winning and best-selling first edition of this book and Disrupting Poverty: Five Powerful Classroom Practices, and the video series, Disrupting Poverty in Elementary and Secondary Classrooms. Her speaking engagements include international and national conferences, webinars, podcasts, and symposiums on topic of poverty and the whole child. She earned her doctorate from the University of Washington in 2005. Budge continues to maintain that her most important and significant work has been teaching first graders to read.