Roddy Theobald is a managing researcher in the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at AIR. His primary responsibilities include overseeing eight externally-funded research projects related to the teacher labor market and its implications for student outcomes. He has extensive experience using large administrative datasets to ...
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 ...
A new international grading index that provides states, school districts and policymakers with a way to determine where their students rank in comparison with their peers around the world finds that U.S. elementary school students show average performance, at best, in mathematics and are widely outperformed by their counterparts in ...
A rigorous 2017 study found no significant effect of the $7 billion federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program on student outcomes. But the story of SIG is far more complex. In this blog post, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch unpacks the story of SIG, highlighting instances in which program elements worked, ...
This paper considers three alternative approaches to setting performance standards (the predictive, the international benchmark, and the baseline normative approaches) and hybrid approaches that combine features across these three.
While evidence is mounting about school-level programs and policies that contribute to increased high school graduation rates, little attention has been paid to the role that districts can play in creating conditions for and supporting higher graduation rates. This study chronicles the Stockton Unified School District's response to high schools ...
The School Improvement Grant program awarded grants to states that agreed to implement one of four school intervention models—transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure—in their lowest-performing schools. This final report builds on the earlier briefs and report by including an additional year of data and by examining whether receipt of SIG ...
The Integrated Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Fidelity Rubric (IMFR) is a tool to assess an elementary school’s implementation of Integrated Multi-tiered Systems of Support (I-MTSS). I-MTSS is a model where academic and social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) supports are strategically combined to improve student academic (e.g., reading and/or math) and ...
When teachers learn, students learn. For decades, AIR has conducted studies of teacher professional learning and helped practitioners use evidence to develop, implement, test, and scale professional learning programs.