Too many new principals say they are underprepared for critical leadership tasks which—combined with high job demands, poor support, and increased accountability—raises principal stress to a boiling point. In this blog post, Matthew Clifford describes 18 “high leverage” state-level policies that hold promise for increasing innovation and improving principal preparation. ...
Mounting evidence shows that social and emotional learning skills may be more predictive than test scores of student success in English language arts and math. In this blog post, Deborah Moroney and Michael McGarrah discuss how states and districts can build systems to support and properly assess these social and ...
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) puts each state in the driver’s seat for making its own K-12 policy. In this blog post, Peter Cookson discusses what this means for educational equity.
In this commentary, Pooja Reddy Nakamura, an AIR senior researcher explores the question of when to introduce English to children in multilingual contexts. Rather than introducing it at the first opportunity, she suggests grouping classes by local language achievement skill—not just age—and introducing written English only after the local language ...
In this blog post, Matthew Soldner argues that, as Congress works on reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the need for far better research and access to federal student aid data should be high on its agenda.
Educating students who have been neglected, delinquent, or are otherwise at-risk requires specialized training and careful collaboration across the agencies responsible for serving for these students. For this reason, each state receives funding from the U.S. Department of Education through the Title I, Part D Neglected or Delinquent Programs. Determining ...
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
What should states and districts working on school improvement keep in mind about successful turnaround efforts? AIR experts have identified nine key conditions that led to successful turnaround in Massachusetts that could be useful to education leaders in other states.
Many schools hoping to infuse practices with research have encountered challenges, and Battle Creek Public Schools’ experience implementing literary instruction grounded in research is no different. These challenges can serve as lessons for other education leaders, as AIR expert Kerstin Le Floch describes in this In the Field piece. ...
Evidence plays a critical role in designing and implementing approaches that accelerate learning and provide all students with equal access to a quality education. This blog post describes some of what AIR has learned about the approaches in the federal agenda.