In these episodes from the Education Policy Center, Kerstin Carlson LeFloch and Catherine Barbour discuss what research tells us about best practices in school improvement. How can teachers and leaders work together to support school improvement? What are three critical components of school improvement? ...
District leaders are increasingly recognizing the value of working with their peers in other districts to tackle their most pressing challenges. Without careful attention to the factors that help cross-district learning occur, however, education leaders looking to achieve systemwide change may fail to capitalize on the potential of working together ...
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, requires that states develop and submit a State Plan to the U.S. Department of Education. To ensure a solid foundation for State Plan development and further stakeholder engagement, the Pennsylvania Department of Education asked AIR summarize ...
Over the past decade, a number of reform efforts have aimed at reducing the size of the learning communities in the nation’s schools. This paper describes the framework underlying our evaluation design of a large-scale, multifaceted school reform initiative and identifies some of the methodological challenges inherent in work of ...
Each year, when states release assessment results, new schools join the ranks of those identified for improvement under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Associated with this identification are mandated actions which have the potential to derail or redirect existing school reform efforts. The question remains of how to reconcile the implementation ...
The latest Surgeon General’s Report, “The Health Consequences of Smoking – 50 Years of Progress,” marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark reports warning about the health hazards of smoking. Fifty years, 20 million American deaths, and 32 Surgeon General Reports later, smoking has retained its decades-old spot as the ...
This report, authored by Helen Duffy of the National High School Center, provides an in-depth look at the implementation and structural issues, as well as the needed support required to successfully institute Response to Intervention (RTI) at the secondary school level.
The initiatives to enhance adult learning program accountability and assessment systems of the following states are described in this paper: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Oregon, Texas, Washington, West Virginia.
Schools that show better academic performance than would be expected given characteristics of the school and student populations are often described as “beating the odds.” State and local education agencies often attempt to identify such schools as a means of identifying strategies or practices that might be contributing to the ...
An extensive compilation of the questions asked at the National Center on Student Progress Monitoring's first Summer Institute about Curriculum Based Measurement, as well as others that may be helpful.