SEPTEMBER 2008

Message from the director
Terese Rainwater

It’s back-to-school time, and across the country, SSI states are seeing a new crop of Scholars start high school, and are preparing to introduce thousands of 8th graders to the value of a rigorous education. In the last several months, SSI has learned more about the value of that education from two equally important sources: the real world and research.

In late April SSI hosted the National Summit on Academic Rigor and Relevance in Boston, with the goal of examining the role and effectiveness of the business community in driving national education reform conversations and discussing policy efforts to increase academic rigor and to improve academic relevance in high school. In attendance were teams from 36 states and territories (including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Guam, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virgin Islands, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming). “Teams” is not a euphemism. State participants didn’t come to Boston to listen passively to keynote speakers but to work together. And they worked hard, convening each day to discuss the real-world challenges in their states and possible solutions. Thanks to such discussions, they’re making SSI and the principles behind it a working reality in their states – an impressive accomplishment.

Equally impressive were the presentations by plenary speakers, including Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics and resident scholar at the Illinois Math and Science Academy; Charles Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development; and Roy Romer, former governor of Colorado and superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, now head of the Strong American Schools initiative. Lorena Riffo Jenson, chair of the Utah Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, headed up a panel on rigor and relevance that included Belle Wheelan, president of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools; Mark Milliron, CEO of Catalyze Learning International; and Phyllis Hudecki, executive director of the Oklahoma Business and Education Coalition. To hear what the plenary speakers said and to read about the summit, visit our website, where we’ve posted the proceedings, along with video clips of the summit presentations.

The main take-away from the summit: SSI’s work is essential. And that finding was underlined by recent research by SSI evaluator Karen Paulson, a senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. Paulson found that SSI positively influences student plans to take a rigorous curriculum in high school, as well as positively influencing adult stakeholders (counselors, parents, teachers, business participants) regarding their perspective on the importance of the SSI core course of study – more evidence that as we head back to school, SSI is the right path to choose.

And as we show on the following pages – which report on SSI state partnership news from the last several months, as well as their plans for the future – it’s a path being chosen by more and more students. As kids head back to school, SSI states are expanding their programs to more schools and districts and providing more students with the information and opportunity to become State Scholars. We look forward to an exciting year.

One bit of sad news for us at SSI: our coworker Christian Martinez, who has been the State Scholars program coordinator since its inception at WICHE, is leaving to take a job at McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning), where he’ll be senior consultant for development. We’ll greatly miss his professionalism, his creativity and his fantastic sense of humor. We wish him the very best.