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 ...
Contributing and working alongside Native Nations, AIR has a deep commitment to engaging communities, fostering shared vision and values, building capacity, and developing strategic alliances to achieve sustainable systems change in Indian Country.
Every year, City Year recruits a diverse group of Student Success Coaches, ages 18-25, to deliver its holistic Whole School Whole Child (WSWC) model. Juliette Berg and David Osher discuss AIR's five-year evaluation of the model's challenges and opportunities.
Most educators have seen programs and initiatives come and go, often with little improvement to show for the effort. In many cases, the problem may not lie with the program but with faulty implementation. Before judging the effectiveness of a new initiative, education leaders need to look at actual changes ...
In 2005 AIR partnered with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to identify the core indicators that schools must actively manage to support student success, and develop an instrument to assess these indicators. Based on consensus from a meeting of national experts and district staff, and refined through a series of 22 ...
During the past 20 years, the afterschool field has been held accountable in varying ways—first, on the ability to provide safe places for young people to spend time while their parents work; then, on success in helping to improve participants’ academic achievement as a supplement to the school day. This ...
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 ...
The expanded learning field continues to bring multiple stakeholders together to advance program quality and research. This article from the Journal of Expanded Learning Opportunities features a dialogue on the topic of program quality in expanded learning programs between Michael Funk, afterschool division director for the California Department of Education, ...
In this report, we communicate the state of K-12 social studies education by examining the following topics: trends in the development and content of state social studies standards; the landscape of curriculum materials and state and district efforts in evaluating these materials; and gaps in the field for further investigation. ...
A rigorous 2017 study found no significant effect of the $7 billion federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program on student outcomes. But the story of SIG is far more complex. In this blog post, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch unpacks the story of SIG, highlighting instances in which program elements worked, ...