AIR's team of researchers and practitioners works with clients to achieve solutions to complex policy and practice problems and to identify and support effective approaches that help teachers thrive. Our team supports clients in developing impactful policies and practices across teachers’ entire career, beginning with recruitment and preparation, and continuing ...
Renewing the conversation on teachers’ role in educational reform, the U.S. Department of Education’s new Excellent Educators for All Initiative requires states to consult with teachers when creating new plans to ensure students have equitable access to educators. The Department also recently launched a website to encourage educators to share ...
Now that states have started submitting their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans, the hard work of implementation will soon be underway. AIR experts provide evidence-based policy perspectives on ESSA and states’ strategies outlined in their proposed plans.
Evaluation systems appear to be one of the most rapidly changing policy issues affecting teachers in recent years. This paper provides a brief synopsis of the process of dissecting the evaluation system.
This spotlight takes a look at the history of Title I, how the program has changed over time, and how it affects children, schools, families and education policy. Experts weigh in on the program's past and future in interviews, briefs, and blogs.
School improvement policy for the past few decades has been characterized by mandated lists of activities designed to stimulate a dramatic turnaround in student achievement. In the long run, this policy approach did not engender the necessary school-level changes. This brief demonstrates why new policies must aim to get the ...
Susan Therriault is an education researcher whose work straddles equity, K-12 school improvement, and policy. In this Q&A, she describes her career and her work with the COVID-19 Equity in Education project.
This brief discusses scientifically based reading instruction in relation to federal policy mandates and focuses on strategies and standards for ensuring that teachers are qualified to teach reading.
Ashu Handa is an economist whose work centers on global poverty, health, and human development in sub-Saharan Africa. At AIR, he works to expand Equity Initiative work internationally and supports AIR’s global poverty research and policy efforts. He has been a professor at the University of North Carolina for 20 ...
Too many new principals say they are underprepared for critical leadership tasks which—combined with high job demands, poor support, and increased accountability—raises principal stress to a boiling point. In this blog post, Matthew Clifford describes 18 “high leverage” state-level policies that hold promise for increasing innovation and improving principal preparation. ...