AIR examines 16 successful applications from the Race to the Top District awards. Four trends mark grantees' efforts to implement teaching and learning innovations, including blended learning environments, individualized career readiness plans, and empowering stakeholders.
AIR and Turnaround for Children have authored two white papers to support districts who are applying for the Race to the Top – District (RTTD) competition. The two white papers provide guidelines for establishing foundational conditions as outlined by RTTD and for using a specific set of metrics to measure ...
An extensive compilation of the questions asked at the National Center on Student Progress Monitoring's first Summer Institute about Curriculum Based Measurement, as well as others that may be helpful.
Education leaders have expressed concern about educators’ moving to different schools—within the same state or in another state—because these moves create costs for the home district and have potential impacts on the equitable distribution of effective educators among schools. This study's findings provide initial insights into the intrastate and interstate ...
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 ...
Educator performance evaluation systems are a potential tool for improving student achievement by increasing the effectiveness of the educator workforce. This report is based on a study on the implementation of teacher and principal performance measures highlighted by recent research, as well as the impact of providing feedback based on ...
Over the last decade, educators have become increasingly interested in continuous improvement (CI) as a strategy for reform. For this literature review, AIR set out to locate empirical studies that described the process of implementing CI, as well as studies that analyzed the conditions that foster or limit its use. ...
Emerging research suggests some promising features of educator performance evaluation measures, such as additional observations of the same teacher and providing more frequent, specific feedback on classroom practice. This report, which discusses first year results of an evaluation of three performance measures for evaluating teachers and principals, found that the ...
What impact do Teach for America (TFA) members have on other teachers' performance? A strategy to "cluster" TFA members in high-need schools contributed to large gains in math achievement, but was found to have little effect on reading skills and no spillover effect on other teachers.
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.