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#10 | Celebrating The Bush Center's top ten milestones of 2011

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Learn more about Hannah Abney.
Hannah Abney
Chief Communications Counselor
George W. Bush Presidential Center

Milestone 10: Launched cornerstone projects in education reform This year marked the launch of two important programs within the education reform...

Milestone 10: Launched cornerstone projects in education reform This year marked the launch of two important programs within the education reform initiative at the George W. Bush Institute. In February, at Stovall Middle School in Houston, TX, Mrs. Bush launched Middle School Matters, a landmark education initiative to increase the number of children who complete middle school at grade level and go on to graduate from high school ready for college or a good job. Middle School Matters (led by Bush Institute Director Anne McClellan, and Fellow Sandy Kress) is a comprehensive research-based program to be applied to middle schools. "Middle school is the last and best chance to prepare students for a successful high school career,” she said to a crowd of 400 students, teachers, parents, education policy experts and city and school leaders. “Research shows with systematic, intensive interventions that students who started middle school behind can catch up."The announcement garnered great press coverage, including a preview article in the Associated Press. In 2012, the Bush Institute looks forward to bringing the program into schools to implement the research, test the model and apply the learnings from those tests as we scale up into even more schools across the country. September brought the introduction of the Global Report Card, an easy to use web-based tool that compares student achievement in virtually every U.S. school district with academic achievement in other developed countries. Launched by Mrs. Bush during NBC’s Education Nation, the Global Report Card was developed by Bush Institute Fellow Jay P. Greene to share facts about the educational performance of U.S. students against their international peers and competitors, and to promote our nation's ability to compete on a global playing field. To date, the Global Report Card website has been visited over 24,000 times, and news outlets across the country from Education Week to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have covered the findings.