States have prioritized documenting and improving the quality of early childhood education programs by developing quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs). This report describes the quality improvement efforts of early childhood education programs participating in Iowa’s voluntary quality rating and improvement system, the Iowa Quality Rating System (QRS). The findings ...
The purpose of this report is to begin a program of research to allow us to better understand how Student Connection constructs related to other educational quality indicators, and how they can be used for school performance management.
This spotlight takes a look at the history of Title I, how the program has changed over time, and how it affects children, schools, families and education policy. Experts weigh in on the program's past and future in interviews, briefs, and blogs.
Principals play a critical role in establishing a school’s climate and culture and in selecting and developing teachers, among other roles. Taken together, the findings in this report suggest that focusing on how to reduce variation in the performance of graduates through training, selection, or other means or how to ...
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 policy brief provides principal evaluation system designers information about the technical soundness and cost (i.e., time requirements) of publicly available school climate surveys.
Using the Internet is the norm for today’s youth. AIR was commissioned by the Pew Internet & American Life Project to conduct a qualitative study of the attitudes and behaviors of Internet-using public middle and high school students drawn from across the country.
The School Improvement Grant program awarded grants to states that agreed to implement one of four school intervention models—transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure—in their lowest-performing schools. This final report builds on the earlier briefs and report by including an additional year of data and by examining whether receipt of SIG ...
AIR has built a strong portfolio of computer science (CS) projects through our CS@AIR initiative. We support more than a dozen projects—all with a focus on ensuring that every student gets access to a high-quality computer science education.
Quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) constitute an ambitious policy approach to improving early care and education practices and child outcomes. A QRIS is a uniform set of ratings, graduated by level of quality, used to assess and improve early learning and care programs. The purpose of this study, conducted ...