Karen Manship is a managing director with AIR focusing on early childhood and K-12 education policy and finance. She currently serves as project manager of the First 5 California Dual Language Learner Pilot Study and of a national study of the Montessori preschool model funded by the Institute for Education ...
Contributing and working alongside Native Nations, AIR has a deep commitment to engaging communities, fostering shared vision and values, building capacity, and developing strategic alliances to achieve sustainable systems change in Indian Country.
Charrise Hollingsworth is a researcher at AIR, where she evaluates programs and initiatives related to thriving youth and adults. Her growing body of work focuses on youth workforce development, advancing equitable outcomes in K-12 education, promoting socioemotional wellness for students and teachers, and supporting AIR’s cross-disciplinary place-based initiatives. A former ...
Sam Rikoon is a senior researcher in the Youth, Family, and Community Development program at AIR. He has extensive experience applying quantitative methods to the development and validation of measures of social and emotional learning (SEL) and other hard-to-measure constructs for use with populations ranging from early childhood through those ...
Just like physical health, mental health is crucial to everyone’s well-being. For Mental Health Awareness Month, five AIR experts reflected on three of the biggest trends and shifts they’ve observed from their collective years in the field.
CS for All Teachers is a virtual community of practice, welcoming all teachers from PreK through high school who are interested in teaching computer science. It provides an online home for teachers to connect with one another and with the resources and expertise they need to successfully teach computer science ...
Implementing skills-based hiring practices can expand the talent pool, improve staff retention, and increase diversity.Today’s economy is marked by the rapid evolution of technology leading to labor shortages and evolving skill needs across the labor market. Finding and retaining a skilled workforce is key to an organization’s growth, yet many ...
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 ...
Since 2004, San Francisco expanded preschool access for children in San Francisco County, regardless of family income through its Preschool for All (PFA) initiative. In December 2005, AIR began a joint process evaluation to assess the implementation of PFA in San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. The process evaluation was ...
Schools and communities encounter enormous challenges in articulating, synthesizing, and implementing all the complex aspects of a comprehensive approach to school safety. This paper aims to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and the application of that evidence in schools and communities by defining the key components of a comprehensive ...