Ten of 18 school improvement models, used in thousands of middle and high schools, demonstrate promising evidence of raising student achievement, according to a first-of-its-kind comprehensive review of research on the models conducted by AIR.
Interest in work-based learning has grown as a strategy for providing opportunities for students to learn and demonstrate career-readiness skills. This resource explores how states and districts can use intermediary strategies to build high-quality work-based learning systems.
As the U.S. Department of Education invites school districts to apply for nearly $120 million in new Race to the Top-District (RTT-D) grants, AIR has released an issue paper that examines the approaches taken by 16 districts awarded early grants and identifies their common ideas for developing personalized learning environments. ...
This user-friendly guidebook and toolkit was developed by special education experts to support charter school leaders and special education managers as they build special education programs to serve students with disabilities.
An early warning system allows educators to assign and provide appropriate interventions to at-risk students early on, during the 9th grade year, to prevent dropout before it happens. This video from REL Midwest summarizes research on early warning systems and dropout prevention.
The purpose of this project is to plan, research, design, and execute the annual Indicators of School Crime and Safety, a flagship report co-sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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. ...
AIR, as a partner in the California Comprehensive Center at WestEd, worked with the K-12 Innovation and Improvement Office (formerly the Middle Grades Improvement Office) at the California Department of Education to conduct a study on student transitions from the middle grades to high school.
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 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.