The 2012 Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration program was designed to strengthen existing youth mentoring programs across the United States. In this Q&A, Manolya Tanyu describes the effectiveness of the programmatic enhancements—and the challenges of implementing them across a wide array of youth mentoring organizations. ...
States and school districts have made significant investments in systems to measure teacher performance, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. In this report, AIR experts share their findings from the two-year Beyond Accountability project, in which four school districts identified a specific problem of practice and used plan-do-study-act ...
COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted K–12 schooling. A working paper from AIR’s National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) suggests the prevalence of COVID in the community could be an important factor in deciding whether public schools reopen or remain open.
What impact do Teach for America (TFA) members have on other teachers' performance? A strategy to "cluster" TFA members in high-need schools contributed to large gains in math achievement, but was found to have little effect on reading skills and no spillover effect on other teachers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that 13–20% of children living in the U.S. experience a mental disorder in a given year. The prevalence of these conditions is on the rise, and in the wake of recent tragedies, addressing the behavioral health needs of young people is an ...
Susan Therriault is an education researcher whose work straddles equity, K-12 school improvement, and policy. In this Q&A, she describes her career and her work with the COVID-19 Equity in Education project.
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 ...
Amidst numerous issues plaguing the San José Unified School District, the San José superintendent and the San José Teachers Association president came together to find common ground and chart a new path. This report shares the lessons learned over 24 years of collaboration between the district and the union, and ...
This report found that absences, course failures, course credits and GPA all can be used to accurately predict whether ninth-graders with disabilities will graduate from high school. Identifying these early warning indicators is especially crucial for students with disabilities, who drop out of high school at alarming rates. ...
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included $4.35 billion for Race to the Top (RTT), one of the Obama administration’s signature programs and one of the largest federal government investments in an education grant program. This final report examines how receipt of RTT grants was related to student ...