Early warning systems offer a way to use available data to identify students at risk and drive targeted interventions that help them get back on track. This issue paper includes lessons learned from more than seven years of working with individual schools, school districts, and state education agencies as they ...
At least half of states administer or are developing kindergarten entry assessments. In fall 2017 the Illinois State Board of Education began requiring teachers to report data on every child’s skills at kindergarten entry using the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey.
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.
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 ...
Apprenticeship provides opportunities for individuals to access well-paying careers through a training model that combines paid on-the-job-training and classroom education. This model can support access to opportunities for economic mobility for nontraditional learners and individuals from historically underserved communities. However, many promising candidates never pursue apprenticeship, and those who do ...
Overall, performance of low-performing schools (both those participating and not participating in the HPSGP) is improving in an era in which state and federal accountability systems have been introduced.
School Improvement Grants are provided by the Department of Education in an attempt to raise the achievement of students in the state’s lowest-performing schools. The purpose of this report is to describe several state-developed alternative intervention models approved by the Department of Education. ...
As California approaches a new system of academic standards, instruction, and assessment, it enters familiar territory. The use of multiple modes of assessment, tight alignment between assessments and expectations for student learning, and a focus on assessment for formative (as well as summative) purposes—all with an emphasis on students’ understanding ...
Did Congress make the right fixes to the rules governing funding for teaching and learning in ESSA? Kind of, according to AIR expert Jane Coggshall, in this blog post.
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on turning around our nation’s low-performing schools, with substantial investments from the U.S. Department of Education into new and continuing awards under the federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program. This brief focuses on the implementation of SIG by examining three interrelated ...