Responding Quickly to Education Challenges in the Midwest
States face rapidly evolving education challenges and often require timely, reliable, and context‑specific support to make informed decisions. When responding to issues quickly, state education agencies need access to clear guidance, credible evidence, and specialized expertise.
The Midwest Comprehensive Center is partnering with state education agencies in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin to deliver flexible technical assistance so state education leaders can act decisively to improve student outcomes.
Midwest CC will support the region by:
- Providing just-in-time support through tool and resource development; and
- Synthesizing evidence-based strategies to inform state decision-making.
Through these collaborative efforts, education leaders in the region will have increased knowledge of priority topics to inform decision-making to improve responsiveness to emerging needs.
Reports
Innovative State Assessment Initiatives: A National Landscape of Modernizing K-12 Assessment Systems
Recent state assessment innovation increasingly focuses on making assessment systems more instructionally useful, moving away from approaches in which results arrive too late to inform instruction or school improvement.
A new report from Midwest CC provides a national landscape of state assessment innovations, highlighting how systems are evolving to enable a more balanced, coherent assessment system—one in which classroom, interim, and statewide assessments work together to support learning rather than operate in isolation.
Strengthening Navigation Across Young People’s Learning Ecosystems
Young people learn across a broad learning ecosystem that includes schools, communities, afterschool programs, and other learning settings. As learning opportunities expand across these settings, families and caregivers play an important role in helping young people explore, identify, and access opportunities that align with their needs, interests, and goals.
Midwest CC developed two complementary briefs to help education leaders strengthen family and caregiver navigation across learning ecosystems.
Supports for Family Navigation: State Models examines how state education agencies structure family navigation, including family-facing information, digital navigation tools, human-centered supports, and connections to out-of-school-time opportunities. It highlights approaches that states and communities can adapt to their existing systems and priorities.
Emerging Practices in Family Engagement to Support State Navigation Initiatives focuses on how family engagement can strengthen navigation across state, local, school, and community settings. It highlights emerging practices and provides a structured set of family engagement strategies to inform the design and implementation of navigation efforts.
