In this commentary published in the Hill, Dan Goldhaber, AIR vice president and director of CALDER, and John C. White, Louisiana state superintendent of education, discuss the importance of formal mentoring for teachers during their career training.
Student learning measures have rapidly become common in teacher evaluation systems across the United States. This report provides an overview of key findings from the nearly 20 studies of SLO measures that have been conducted to date, along with considerations for future research and for practice.
The U.S. Department of Education commissioned AIR to conduct a national study to evaluate how adult education operates at the state and local levels, including who adult education providers are, the services they provide, and the challenges they face. Stephanie Cronen answered some questions about adult education and what the ...
Early warning systems offer a way to use available data to identify students at risk and drive targeted interventions that help them get back on track. This issue paper includes lessons learned from more than seven years of working with individual schools, school districts, and state education agencies as they ...
Developing reliable and valid national-level survey measures of instructional processes and other classroom conditions related to learning has proven exceptionally difficult. This report focuses on the size of the impact that can be expected from instruction and teachers on student achievement and on the conceptualization of measures of instruction and ...
The U.S. Department of Education has invested substantial funds in turning around the nation’s lowest performing schools and has contracted with AIR to examine how schools’ receiving federal school improvement grants (SIGs) are changing over time.
Pursuant to the accountability requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (as reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act), New York City’s Community School District 5 wanted to determine which practices and strategies enabled some elementary and middle schools within the district to reach high levels of performance ...
Typical approaches to professional learning are often driven by district or campus priorities, rather than by the individual needs of teachers. Adult learning and motivation theories emphasize the importance of allowing teachers autonomy over their own learning. Moreover, teachers may have the best understanding of what kind of learning would ...
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 ...
Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) have recently come to the forefront as a potential solution for measuring student growth, particularly for educators in subjects or grades not covered by a state standardized assessment. This paper discusses the steps for using SLOs as a measure of growth, identifies key considerations for successful ...