Alicia Espinoza is a senior technical assistance consultant at AIR. Her expertise includes coaching teacher leaders, school administrators, and district leaders through the implementation of evidence-based district and school improvement systems, processes, and practices. She specializes in school-wide design and implementation of professional learning communities, literacy in secondary and adult ...
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.
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 ...
As a part of the Striving Readers program supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Milwaukee Public Schools implemented the Read 180 program in five schools in an effort to provide targeted literacy supports to struggling students. This evaluation update details the results of the evaluation, which show that the ...
The return of American men and women in uniform serving in Iraq and Afghanistan rivals the scale of World War II demobilizations in some communities. In partnership with the National Center on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the National Center on Family Homelessness created Community Circles of Support for Veterans Families, ...
Very few mentoring programs have been scientifically evaluated or established as evidence-based practices. However, some programs show empirical evidence that participating youth do better.This brief looks at ways in which mentoring programs can effectively serve African American boys and presents a list of promising programs with positive outcomes. These programs ...
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 ...
Rachel Garrett is a managing researcher at AIR with a focus on quantitative analysis and methodology. Her major areas of research include educator effectiveness, English learners, math learning and instruction, and educational applications of technology.Dr. Garrett currently serves as the project director for a randomized efficacy study of a technology-enhanced, ...
Mary Bridget Burns is a senior researcher at AIR. Dr. Burns has over a decade of experience as an educator, from teaching elementary school and preparing pre-service teachers, to conducting research studies on educational practices and policies. Dr. Burns brings her background in educational leadership, bilingualism, school improvement, and systems ...
What impact do Teach for America (TFA) members have on other teachers' performance? A strategy to "cluster" TFA members in high-need schools contributed to large gains in math achievement, but was found to have little effect on reading skills and no spillover effect on other teachers.