Ben Backes is currently a principal economist at AIR. His 2012 dissertation focused on the impact of statewide bans on the use of racial preferences in college admissions.
Dr. Backes has published papers on several topics, including whether affirmative action bans depressed minority college enrollment rates, and whether the bans discouraged ...
The intent of most employment equity analyses is to determine what the treatment of a protected group of employees would have been in the absence of discrimination. To be valid, those analyses have to take into account any legally relevant differences between the protected employees and a comparison group of employees. ...
Bridges to Equity: A Promising Beginning is the first annual report of the AIR Equity Initiative and describes some of the progress that has been made towards improving the lives of individuals and communities that have been segregated by race or place.
Maher & Maher was recently awarded a five-year Industry Intermediary contract by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship in order to expand access to apprenticeships in the field of Information Technology. Maher, a subsidiary of AIR, will work with its strategic partner CompTIA, the world’s leading technology trade ...
AIR's Evidence Support Center helps educators navigate the path from evidence to practice. The Center has developed a library of strategies to support the identification and implementation of evidence-based strategies. The dynamic, user-friendly interface allows users to match their needs and context to outcomes they want to improve and identify ...
For the DOL’s Chief Evaluation Office, AIR and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research built a microsimulation model to simulate policies for paid worker leave in the U.S. The goal of this study was to create a publicly available paid leave microsimulation tool that is open-source and based on the ...
The initiatives to enhance adult learning program accountability and assessment systems of the following states are described in this paper: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Oregon, Texas, Washington, West Virginia.
In 2017, 11 states were awarded a combined $380 million in Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy (SRCL) grants to support schools and teachers in providing comprehensive literacy instruction and evidence-based practices, with a focus on serving disadvantaged schools. An additional 24 grants worth $380 million were awarded across the 2019 and ...
Jessica Barnier is a project specialist at AIR. She has more than 15 years’ experience in project management and serves as a project manager for several projects in workforce and education. Her primary responsibilities include managing projects for contracts with federal agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Education and ...
Johannes M. (Hans) Bos is a senior vice president and Institute Fellow at AIR. Dr. Bos is a nationally recognized expert in the conduct of randomized control trials in education and other areas of social policy research. Since 1992 he has conducted numerous evaluations and policy studies in education, child ...