Principal observation tools are used to accurately evaluate principal performance by helping principal supervisors and coaches improve instructional leadership. This piece describes how using the right tools is helping principals in the U.S. Virgin Islands develop such evidence-based coaching and performance evaluations. ...
School principals are second only to classroom teachers as the most influential school factor in student achievement. For the lowest-performing schools, strong leadership—including setting and maintaining direction—plays a key role in turning around schools' performance and improving student outcomes. Assessing the performance of principals is essential given the position's critical ...
Unlike the K-12 school system, the preschool system does not maintain unique child identifiers, making it difficult to impossible to track children’s enrollment in child care. This needs assessment of preschool supply and demand in the state of California uses existing public data sources to estimate, by county and zip ...
In California, the demand for full-day, full-year early care and education programs has grown over time due to changing family needs. The purpose of this policy brief is specifically to address the financing issues involved in providing full-day, full-year preschool programs.
Principals play a critical role in establishing a school’s climate and culture and in selecting and developing teachers, among other roles. Taken together, the findings in this report suggest that focusing on how to reduce variation in the performance of graduates through training, selection, or other means or how to ...
Having a more effective teacher or principal can substantially improve students’ academic outcomes. This brief examines the effects of using research-based performance measures to evaluate educators and provide them with feedback, and of offering them bonuses based on their performance ratings.
Emerging research suggests some promising features of educator performance evaluation measures, such as additional observations of the same teacher and providing more frequent, specific feedback on classroom practice. This report, which discusses first year results of an evaluation of three performance measures for evaluating teachers and principals, found that the ...
Too many students, especially those with disabilities, lack basic reading and math skills or have serious disciplinary problems in school. In a special issue of Teaching Exceptional Children, edited by AIR's Maurice McInerney, experts from the National Center on Intensive Intervention offer educators practical suggestions to help meet the needs ...
School finance can play a critical role in giving all students an opportunity to achieve. Jesse Levin examines why it's important to accurately measure students' needs to ensure that they receive an equitable and adequate education.
In this blog post, David Osher, AIR vice president and international expert on school climate, social emotional learning, and student support, shares an interesting perspective about making a difference through school climate.