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MCNC's school Greer appealed against the South Carolina's Department of Education and won the right to be amongst 14 out of 179 high schools statewide to met the No Child Left Behind standards.

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

A wonderful 5-minute video that captures not only the concepts underlying a "more intensive pathway" in cc developmental studies but also the same thinking behind the MC-EC high school integrated approach--affective, academic, college success skills

Five South Carolina public schools are among the 300 schools nationwide named 2010 No Child Left Behind-Blue Ribbon winners today by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  Official award ceremonies take place in November in Washington, DC.

By Richard DuFour, published in Educational Leadership, May 2004, V. 61, N. 8, p 6-11. Educational Leadership is a publication of ASCD. Author discusses the concepts of Professional Learning Communities, the ideas behind their core principles and how the principles guide schools' efforts to sustain the professional learning community model until it becomes inherent in a school's culture.

Originally the Greater Texas Student Loan Corporation, since 2005 this organization has reorganized with a grant-making focus and a mission to support "efforts to ensure all Texas students are prepared for, have access to, persist in, and complete post-secondary education." As of October 2011, the Foundation has put $3million behind "the GTF Scholars: Early College High School Transfer Scholarship and Retention Program" for students who have completed an early college program.

Regularly updated information provided by Center on Education Policy (CEP). This state-by-state list details which states have applied (or plain to apply) for waivers to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as announced by Education Secretary Arne Duncan in August 2011.

This is wonderfully enlightening article by Michael H. Levine and James Paul Gee