Karen Hawley Miles

Karen Hawley Miles, President, Education Resource Management Strategies, describes three school-level resources: the use of time, the organization of staff, and the use of funds from external sources. She also discusses the resource principles that are present in high-performing schools.

"Basically, when we think about allocating resources at the school level, you have to think about how time is used during the day for instruction, how people are organized, how funds from external sources are used. There are a couple of what I call resource principles that high performing schools tend to do in terms of the way they organize their teachers and their students. They tend not to have as many specialized programs that either conducted as add ons to the regular programs or pull outs, so they take some of the resources for special education, bilingual, so on and they integrate that into their overall resources, say for providing reading. The second thing they do is they tend to have fewer support staff that pull many of those roles into the teaching roles in exchange for have smaller ratios of students to deal with. The high performing schools that I've worked with have a very clear idea of their educational program and philosophy. That means that often they've selected a particular literacy model, they've worked hard to create an educational philosophy, and they recruit teachers who want to work in that particular school based on that philosophy and the educational approach. They also recruit teachers that provide for them special skills that they may not have on their team."