Mary Kay Dugan is a managing technical assistant consultant at AIR. She is passionate about identifying evidence-based promising practices and translating them into policies and effective programs focused on underserved populations including disadvantaged youth and young adults. Dugan has over 30 years of experience helping federal, state, and local governments ...
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 ...
Large numbers of Zambian children suffer from nutrition-related disorders such as low birth weight, wasting, being underweight, chronic malnutrition, and various nutrient deficiencies. AIR and its partners are evaluating the First 1000 Most Critical Days Program, which addresses these issues by targeting households with pregnant women or children under two ...
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 ...
Researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and funders are increasingly aware of the powerful potential for summertime experiences and the need to design, implement, and continuously improve summertime experiences for all.
Justice-impacted youth remain a historically under-represented demographic in workforce, as well as in career and technical education (CTE) programs. To address this under-representation, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) collaborated with AIR to develop a comprehensive resource of best practices and strategies aimed at recruiting justice-involved students into ...
A study by AIR sheds light on the specific strategies and practices that may account for differences in student achievement among Boston's traditional, pilot, and charter schools. According to the study, high-achieving schools of all types—traditional, charter, and pilot—share a critical common characteristic: school leaders with enough autonomy to deliver ...
Charter schools have become a widely used alternative to traditional public schools, and play an increasingly important role in state reform efforts. South Carolina stakeholders wanted to broaden their understanding of why some charter schools are more successful than others to inform their consideration of whether to expand this school ...
Empowering youth to address structural barriers to adolescent health and well-being within schools and communities is an important part of realizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH) vision. Schools and communities are stronger when youth develop essential life skills, work together, ...
The Texas Summer Learning Study is an independent study by AIR, in collaboration with the Texas Education Agency, and with support from The Wallace Foundation. This four-year implementation study will build from research on summer learning programs to understand the use of evidence-based design principles. What are evidence-based design principles? ...