Today, success isn’t just about what you know. It’s also about how quickly you can grasp and apply new knowledge. That’s the theory behind “deeper learning,” a broad term encompassing the goals of an increasing number of U.S. schools and school systems. In a series of reports, researchers at AIR ...
Turning around our nation’s low-performing schools became a national priority—and central focus of education policy at all levels—in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. Then Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants redoubled the nation’s emphasis on school turnaround, giving states more resources to advance improvement efforts within federal ...
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 ...
The initiatives to enhance adult learning program accountability and assessment systems of the following states are described in this paper: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Oregon, Texas, Washington, West Virginia.
District leaders are increasingly recognizing the value of working with their peers in other districts to tackle their most pressing challenges. Without careful attention to the factors that help cross-district learning occur, however, education leaders looking to achieve systemwide change may fail to capitalize on the potential of working together ...
Despite the promise and potential of cash transfers to empower women, the evidence supporting this outcome is mixed. This paper based on an evaluation of the Government of Zambia’s Child Grant Programme, a transfer given to mothers or primary caregivers of young children aged 0 to 5, shows there is ...
With Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement of the Excellent Educators for All initiative earlier this month, putting excellent principals at the helm of high-need schools remains critical. To better prepare the new principals, Aaron Butler contends in this blog post, state- and district-level leaders should make leadership development and coaching ...
Recent research shows that while the overall achievement gap between African-American and white males is narrowing, the rate of progress is glacial. In this blog post, Peter Cookson discusses the President's "My Brother's Keeper" initiative and what needs to be done to make it a success.
A growing number of school districts are using early warning systems in their strategy for improving rates of student on-time graduation. The study used student-level data and a five-step process to identify the most accurate indicators of students’ failure to graduate from high school on time.
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 ...