Millions of students around the world have signed up to take massive open online courses (MOOCs) and many institutions are offering them or weighing doing so. That makes it vital for higher education researchers and other experts in the field to evaluate the early impact of ...
An AIR report finds that Pennsylvania’s system for financing public schools severely underfunds many of the state’s highest need urban and rural public school districts. The report found that the average levels of both school spending and student achievement in Pennsylvania are above the national average, but fail to meet ...
Competency-based education makes student mastery of learning goals—rather than seat time—the metric to determine student credit and progression. Take a closer look at how schools implement competency-based education, and how it is related to what students need to learn effectively.
Teachers are the number-one factor in student learning, so preparing and supporting high-quality teachers of computer science is critical. AIR is working with states, districts, and teachers to implement and test three promising strategies to strengthen teacher preparation and development:
In a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study that spanned more than a decade, AIR found that attending a high school with an explicit focus on deeper learning resulted in positive short-term outcomes, but few longer-term outcomes. In this Q&A, AIR Principal Researcher Kristina Zeiser and Senior Researcher Catherine Bitter share insights about ...
Charter school stakeholders in South Carolina expressed interest in understanding the leadership characteristics and practices of charter school leaders across the state. Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast helped develop an online survey of characteristics and practices that was administered by the South Carolina Department of Education to leaders of all charter ...
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."
Exclusionary school discipline policies once instituted to prevent serious infractions have crept into discipline practices for minor issues. Youth who participated in a roundtable on the subject contend that it limits opportunities to learn and compromises academic achievement; is applied disproportionately and subjectively; and deprives students of the ...
Nineteen youths accepted AIR's invitation to talk about how harsh school discipline has impacted them and the risks and challenges of the "school-to-prison" pipeline in front of an audience of policymakers and practitioners who work on juvenile justice and related issues. The participants, ages 16 to 24, spoke ...
This is the second of two conversations by current and former colleagues Robert “Bob” Kim and Terris Ross. Kim, an AIR Institute Fellow, served as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration. Their first conversation focused on policy ...