Created in 2010 by the Kindergarten Readiness Act, transitional kindergarten (TK) offers younger children in California additional time to prepare for school. AIR undertook a five-year evaluation study of the TK program in 2012. In light of conversations across the country about increasing access to high-quality early childhood education, AIR’s ...
A new guide using strict scientific criteria to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of 22 widely adopted comprehensive elementary school reform models rates 15 as “limited” to “moderately strong” in demonstrating positive effects on student achievement.
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.
States and schools receiving funding under a $7 billion Obama administration investment in Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants generally used more of the education principles embedded in those programs than those not receiving such grants, a new report released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of ...
Thirty years after the release of the landmark A Nation at Risk report on the quality of U.S. education, seven experts with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) assess the report’s lasting impact in relation to current education challenges and reforms.
A new evaluation of Title III implementation, released by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), found that states and school districts vary widely in how they define English Learners (ELs) and how they set thresholds for achieving proficiency in English. As a ...
Head Start, a leader for 50 years in preparing children from low income families for kindergarten and beyond, is about to undergo its first comprehensive overhaul since 1975. In this blog post, AIR's Yoni Farber talks about the importance of the change from intermittent workshops to intensive professional development for ...
AIR is convening a network of communities from California, Florida, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington that want to develop community-based research-practice partnerships in order to focus educational improvement efforts after the pandemic.
Three years into a program offering cash grants to some of rural Zambia’s poorest families, the program continues to reduce poverty and increase economic security, but one critical need is still unmet because so few services are offered in the region: improving the nutrition and health of young children. The ...