Alignment between apprenticeship and workforce development systems benefits both systems, as well as their business and job seeker customers. This brief identifies the key dimensions of alignment, shares promising practices, and provides a checklist to assess and strengthen alignment.
To improve overall educational attainment and support equitable outcomes, it is critical to support working-age adults’ enrollment in postsecondary education—focusing especially on adult learners of color. This project, supported by Lumina Foundation, aims to help leaders at postsecondary institutions and state system offices design programs in ways that support the ...
Elizabeth Zachry Rutschow is a managing researcher at AIR. She is an expert in postsecondary and adult education reform and has led many large-scale, mixed-methods evaluations of community college and adult education reforms. She is dedicated to using qualitative and quantitative research to improve equity and the prosperity and well-being of ...
As the national economy expands in areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), the teaching of this content has become vital for adults to succeed in the workplace. AIR developed new and innovative ways to improve the teaching of STEM content to adult education students using open educational resources ...
Starting in January, the GED got a lot harder; while the overhaul makes sense, doing well now requires a new level of help that too few studying for it can get. In this blog post, Terry Salinger points to the need for adult charter schools and wraparound services to address ...
Despite a widely held belief that U.S. students do well in mathematics in grade school but decline precipitously in high school, a new study comparing the math skills of students in industrialized nations finds that U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade perform consistently below most of their peers around ...
The initiatives to enhance adult learning program accountability and assessment systems of the following states are described in this paper: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Oregon, Texas, Washington, West Virginia.
Educator performance evaluation systems are a potential tool for improving student achievement by increasing the effectiveness of the educator workforce. This report is based on a study on the implementation of teacher and principal performance measures highlighted by recent research, as well as the impact of providing feedback based on ...
According to new AIR analysis of an international survey, a surprisingly large number of adults in the United States cannot apply reading or math skills to solve simple real life problems. In this blog post, Dan Sherman discusses the PIACC results he says educators, researchers, and policymakers need to explore ...
The Southeast Comprehensive Center (SECC) was one of 15 regional comprehensive centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education for the October 2012–September 2019 grant cycle of the Comprehensive Centers Program. SECC provided training and technical assistance to state education agencies in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, ...