This final brief in a series about ISAs explores the current state of the income share agreement market and highlights opportunities and threats to expansion.

Many schools now use early warning systems to identify students who are at risk of not graduating, with the goal of intervening early to help students get back on track for on-time graduation. This study examined the impact and implementation of one early warning system on student and school outcomes, and provides rigorous initial evidence that even with limited implementation during the first year of adoption, using a comprehensive early warning system can reduce the percentage of students who are chronically absent or who fail one or more courses.

Achievement levels are important yardsticks in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program. In this document, we provide a detailed description of the plausible value method and demonstrate the method by replicating the analyses using SAS and comparing the replicated analysis results with those produced with NAEP Data Explorer. It is intended to provide a complete document for NAEP data users to easily adapt the methodologies with other statistical software packages such as SAS, Stata, R, and so on.

A networked improvement community is a collaborative research partnership that uses the principles of improvement science within networks of organizations to learn from varied implementation of new ideas across contexts. This report aims to guide other researchers, state education agency leaders, and district leaders as they establish networked improvement communities in different contexts.

After test scores on a state language arts assessment at P.S. 52 Sheepshead Bay School in Brooklyn were unsatisfactory, the school's principal searched for a way to improve academic outcomes for his students. Partnering with AIR, the school used response to intervention, a research-based framework that uses data-based decision-making and three levels of instruction to address a wide range of student needs. Here's what they learned.

Every year the U.S. Department of Education reports for each state in the country the grade levels, subject areas, and geographic areas that have experienced teacher shortages. By law the Minnesota Department of Education must conduct a multimethod teacher supply and demand study every two years. This report describes the steps in more detail, emphasizing the methods for addressing each research question.

Previous research has shown that about 60 percent of the nearly 24 million children age 5 and under living in the United States have some type of nonparental care arrangement before entering kindergarten. This report presents findings on nonparental care over time, specifically on the arrangements children participate in, the time they spend in these arrangements, and the out-of-pocket expense for these arrangements.

Numerous research studies have shown that dual language/two-way immersion (DL) programs are effective at helping students become bilingual and fluent in English and another language. This research summary can serve as a reference tool that supports state education agency decision-making regarding developing, implementing, and assessing DL programs at the secondary level.

States have prioritized documenting and improving the quality of early childhood education programs by developing quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs). This report describes the quality improvement efforts of early childhood education programs participating in Iowa’s voluntary quality rating and improvement system, the Iowa Quality Rating System (QRS). The findings of this study provide an overview of the landscape of quality improvement activities among early childhood education programs participating in the Iowa QRS and their relationship with increased ratings.