The Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest (REL Midwest), one of ten regional educational laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, serves the educational needs of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Explore these documentaries to learn more about the topics we cover.

Many district and school leaders find it challenging to chart a course to meet continuous improvement goals. AIR’s IL-EMPOWER Launch Package was developed to help Illinois district and school leaders assess their continuous improvement needs and put plans into action to improve educator effectiveness and outcomes for students.

States and school districts have made significant investments in systems to measure teacher performance, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. In this report, AIR experts share their findings from the two-year Beyond Accountability project, in which four school districts identified a specific problem of practice and used plan-do-study-act cycles, an iterative process, to develop, test, and revise their strategies to address that challenge.

To improve education at the school and district levels, it takes real-world, face-to-face partnerships among a variety of stakeholders at the school, district, and state levels, with support from researchers. AIR experts support and study networked improvement communities to find out what works.

The schoolwide program and the targeted assistance program are two approaches related to the ideas established in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that focused on funding being provided to assist low-achieving students in high-poverty schools. This study compares services and resources provided by each approach and the ways these approaches go about allocating their resources.

Amidst numerous issues plaguing the San José Unified School District, the San José superintendent and the San José Teachers Association president came together to find common ground and chart a new path. This report shares the lessons learned over 24 years of collaboration between the district and the union, and the path they are charting moving forward.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has an ongoing commitment to improve support provided to all schools, with an emphasis on the lowest performing schools. This report summarizes findings from AIR’s qualitative analyses of turnaround practices that appear challenging for low-performing high schools, as well as promising practices used by improving and higher performing high schools in the state.

By increasing the capacity and stability of leaders and teachers, low-performing schools may improve student performance and increase graduation rates. This video explores a leadership coaching program that has produced considerable improvements at an Illinois high school.

Although DCPS has made measurable progress over the past five years in terms of the goals laid out in the former Chancellor’s strategic plan, gains have not been evenly distributed among all student groups or across all of DC’s eight wards. To summarize the extent to which DCPS met its goals over the past five years and to highlight specific areas for continued improvement, AIR prepared a policy brief reflecting on DCPS’ progress.

Meeting the needs of English learners (ELs) and students with disabilities (SWDs) is a critical yet challenging responsibility for all schools. This brief highlights four key strategies that emerged from the exploration of practices and systems in place in Massachusetts turnaround schools that successfully provide appropriate interventions to all of their ELs and SWDs.