This brief draws on dialogue and investigation among the district practitioners, researchers, and policymakers participating in the California Collaborative on District Reform. It discusses ways in which districts can approach mathematics education given the current fiscal and political context in California. ...
Building on existing external school support literature, this brief offers a set of indicators for assessing the quality of support provided to low-performing schools, with respect to the No Child Left Behind Act.
AIR surveyed school climate in 33 Alaska school districts between 2006 and 2009. Overall school climate increased in these districts at the same time that statewide achievement test results declined—especially for math. This report explores the nature of the relationship between school climate and student achievement over time, concluding that, ...
States and school districts have made significant investments in systems to measure teacher performance, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. In this report, AIR experts share their findings from the two-year Beyond Accountability project, in which four school districts identified a specific problem of practice and used plan-do-study-act ...
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 ...
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 ...
The School Improvement Grant program awarded grants to states that agreed to implement one of four school intervention models—transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure—in their lowest-performing schools. This final report builds on the earlier briefs and report by including an additional year of data and by examining whether receipt of SIG ...
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.
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.
Each year, when states release assessment results, new schools join the ranks of those identified for improvement under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Associated with this identification are mandated actions which have the potential to derail or redirect existing school reform efforts. The question remains of how to reconcile the implementation ...