As California approaches a new system of academic standards, instruction, and assessment, it enters familiar territory. The use of multiple modes of assessment, tight alignment between assessments and expectations for student learning, and a focus on assessment for formative (as well as summative) purposes—all with an emphasis on students’ understanding ...
As part of recent reforms, states and districts are designing new approaches to holding schools and districts accountable for moving their students closer to achieving state standards in key academic domains. AIR and its partners contracted with the California Department of Education to conduct an independent evaluation of the Immediate ...
This brief uses the experience of eight California school districts—all members of the California Collaborative on District Reform—to suggest a more systemic approach to school turnaround.
Federal School Improvement Grants support turnaround efforts in the nation’s lowest-performing schools, including many that serve a large number of English Language Learner Students. This brief focuses on 11 of these schools with high proportions of ELLs, describing their efforts to improve teachers' capacity for serving ELLs through staffing strategies ...
This spotlight takes a look at the history of Title I, how the program has changed over time, and how it affects children, schools, families and education policy. Experts weigh in on the program's past and future in interviews, briefs, and blogs.
Over the past decade, a number of reform efforts have aimed at reducing the size of the learning communities in the nation’s schools. This paper describes the framework underlying our evaluation design of a large-scale, multifaceted school reform initiative and identifies some of the methodological challenges inherent in work of ...
The science of learning and development (SoLD) is a cross-disciplinary body of knowledge that describes how people learn and develop. AIR is part of the SoLD Alliance, which serves as a resource to connect and support leaders in research, practice, and policy to transform America’s education systems and achieve equity ...
The Local Control Funding Formula has introduced positive and much-needed change to California’s approach to K-12 education funding, but received criticism for being archaic, cumbersome, difficult to complete, opaque, and incoherent. A new brief from the California Collaborative on District Reform and Pivot Learning, Fostering Innovation: How User-Centered Design Can ...
About 1.7 million youth in the U.S. have at least one parent in prison. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of parents held in prisons has risen 79 percent from 1991-2007. Youth with incarcerated parents fare worse than other youth on a range of educational and physical ...
This fourth and final brief in the California Collaborative on District Reform series examines how the Fresno-Long Beach Learning Partnership uses data to inform work across and within the districts. The Partnership is a collaboration that aims to improve student outcomes, accelerate achievement for all students, and close achievement gaps ...