Choosing an effective school principal is one of the most significant decisions that a superintendent or school board can make, as new leadership can propel a district forward in meeting its goals. In this issue brief, AIR staff review the research and summarize the challenges facing school superintendents and hiring ...
Too many new principals say they are underprepared for critical leadership tasks which—combined with high job demands, poor support, and increased accountability—raises principal stress to a boiling point. In this blog post, Matthew Clifford describes 18 “high leverage” state-level policies that hold promise for increasing innovation and improving principal preparation. ...
Child welfare systems in the United States are intended to ensure that children are safe, cared for within stable and loving forever families, and able to thrive in childhood and beyond. This work is both complex and critical, and these systems face a number of ongoing challenges. This blog provides ...
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.
Emerging research suggests some promising features of educator performance evaluation measures, such as additional observations of the same teacher and providing more frequent, specific feedback on classroom practice. This report, which discusses first year results of an evaluation of three performance measures for evaluating teachers and principals, found that the ...
Medicare expert and Institute Fellow Marilyn Moon offers her thoughts on program reforms and urges new HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to defend beneficiaries against unintended harm: “never forget that Medicare is a program for the elderly and disabled.”
According to existing research, giving mothers paid time off could lead to both improved health outcomes and overall costs savings from reduced employee turnover and re-training costs. AIR's Alex Holod describes the benefits of family leave for both parent and child, why some parents aren’t taking full advantage of available ...
A quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) is a voluntary state assessment system that uses multidimensional data on early childhood education programs to rate program quality, support quality improvement efforts, and provide information to families about the quality of available early childhood education programs. This report describes three versions of ...
The Chinle Unified School District faced both leadership challenges and teacher retention problems prior to the 2016-2017 school year. In fall 2017, AIR began providing competency-based turnaround leadership coaching, focusing on the patterns of thinking, feeling, acting, or speaking that cause a principal to be successful. ...
In the fall of 2014, the National Center on Family Homelessness at AIR presented a series of webinars that addressed the impact of trauma on veterans and highlighted trauma-informed care as an organization-wide approach to understanding and responding to trauma. Special focus was given to the experiences of women veterans ...