Core competencies are the capabilities that are critical for afterschool staff to deliver high quality programs. These competencies are intended to set a foundation for professional development, provide opportunities for career advancement, and inform program quality and continuous improvement.
Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments ...
The Center for Coordinated Assistance to States, or CCAS at AIR held its annual State Relations and Assistance Division (SRAD), National Training Conference on November 8–10, 2021. The conference supports SRAD, part of the OJJDP, which helps states and territories prevent and treat delinquency and improve their juvenile justice systems. ...
Cecilia Xuning Zhang is an interdisciplinary researcher with years of mixed-methods research experience and a wide breadth of content knowledge in the areas of Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Technology-Based Learning Supports. She has rich technical expertise in collecting and analyzing extant data to inform enrollment trends and population estimates, leading user ...
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 ...
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives states the authority and flexibility to turn around their lowest performing schools. In this blog post, Allison Gandhi asks if states can succeed where federal policy requirements have run into walls, using the success of the Massachusetts Wraparound Zone initiative as an example. ...
The AIR Equity Initiative is addressing systemic inequalities in the U.S. and globally through our focus on four key areas—educational equity, public safety and policing, workforce development, and community health and well-being. Explore our project library.
Karla López de Nava studies health policy with a focus on Medicare payment models. She uses advanced statistical analyses to evaluate value-based care models on their design, operation, and implementation. Prior to joining AIR, she was a vice president at the Lewin Group.
The Plan, Do, Study, Act Process is central to the improvement of instructional routines. Watch one of the Better Math Teaching Network members in real time and in a real classroom setting introduce the Plan, Do, Study, Act, or PDSA, process.
Samuel E DeWitt is a senior researcher at AIR. Previously, he spent 7 years as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s (UNC Charlotte) Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology. During his time at UNC Charlotte, Dr. DeWitt served as a co-PI for a National Institute ...