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 ...
The Texas Legislature passed a mandate to create several school interventions designed to develop strong and effective school leaders, and funded the Texas Principal Excellence Program (TxPEP) to improve student academic achievement, graduation rates, and teacher retention by improving leadership skills. Specifically, the program was designed to help principals learn ...
In this commentary, Pooja Reddy Nakamura, an AIR senior researcher explores the question of when to introduce English to children in multilingual contexts. Rather than introducing it at the first opportunity, she suggests grouping classes by local language achievement skill—not just age—and introducing written English only after the local language ...
Taking advanced courses in high school predicts a broad array of positive outcomes, yet students from certain backgrounds have been excluded from these courses historically. To address this problem, more than 60 districts in Washington state implemented a policy that automatically enrolled all qualified high school students in advanced coursework. ...
During the Bridges Toward Equity: Making Workforce Development Work for All roundtable event, a panel of AIR and community experts shared how stakeholders can work together to pursue an agenda to increase economic mobility and prosperity for the many Americans who are currently being left behind. Here are five of ...
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."
What should states and districts working on school improvement keep in mind about successful turnaround efforts? AIR experts have identified nine key conditions that led to successful turnaround in Massachusetts that could be useful to education leaders in other states.
Many schools hoping to infuse practices with research have encountered challenges, and Battle Creek Public Schools’ experience implementing literary instruction grounded in research is no different. These challenges can serve as lessons for other education leaders, as AIR expert Kerstin Le Floch describes in this In the Field piece. ...
In this personal essay, AIR Principal Researcher Patricia Garcia-Arena shares her memories of being an English learner in preschool and elementary school—and how early literacy experiences can be better for ELs today, thanks to evidence-based instructional practices.