The old either/or model of college-prep or vocational education is out of sync with the needs of 21st-century America. Career pathways offer a way out of this bind. They help high school students gain secondary and postsecondary education, training, and support services while they acquire marketable skills, industry-recognized credentials, and ...
Federal and state funding for infrastructure, workforce and economic development, and apprenticeship expansion are flowing into states and regional and local entities. Here we describe two of the primary challenges that come with this new funding and promising approaches to address them.
Given persistent failure rates and mounting student debt, how prepared students are to enter and succeed in college is suddenly everyone’s business. According to Mark Schneider, in this blog post, ACT data shows many students ready to leave for college are not ready academically in at least one area. ...
The Program for International Student Assessment, an international assessment of math, is now including a financial literacy component. As Mark Schneider explains in this blog post, the first series of results are not good: In the United States, 18 percent of 15-year-old students scored below the baseline of proficiency. ...
Every year, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics releases an annual report, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being. AIR subject matter experts have identified some interesting findings from several indicators in the 2019 report’s education domain and explain why they matter. ...
In this blog post, Mark Schneider discusses the disconnect between what students and faculty expect from a college education, and how to reconcile those differences.
In this blog post, AIR TA Consultants Erin Duckett and Amy Beller discuss apprenticeships as a potential solution for the shortage of teachers in U.S. schools from early education through high school.
One size does not fit all when it comes to Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher evaluation. In this blog post, Jane Coggshall discusses the difficulty of evaluating CTE teachers based on student progress, the subject of recent research at AIR.
More than 7 million high school and middle school students in Career and Technical Education programs—and their 140,000 teachers—are celebrating Career Technology Education Month in February. In this blog, Catherine Jacques describes the importance of these teachers, based on her recent research.
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."