Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
Given persistent failure rates and mounting student debt, how prepared students are to enter and succeed in college is suddenly everyone’s business. According to Mark Schneider, in this blog post, ACT data shows many students ready to leave for college are not ready academically in at least one area. ...
In this blog post, Peter Cookson says it's time to address the idea of educational rights, asserting that the arc of justice needs to bend in the direction of a universal, free public school system where excellence is distributed not by zip code, skin color, or socio-economic status but as ...
Dr. Deborah Moroney specializes in bridging research and practice, having worked as a staff member for out-of-school programs early in her career. She’s written practitioner and organizational guides; co-authored the fourth edition of “Beyond the Bell®, A Toolkit for Creating High-Quality Afterschool and Expanded Learning Programs,” a seminal afterschool resource; ...
The final report of an ongoing series of reports based on data collected for the Teacher Assignment and Student Work Study for the evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s high school grants. We first review findings on redesigned schools from our previous research and summarize key findings from ...
Practitioners and researchers agree that social and emotional learning (SEL) is essential to academic achievement and well-being in school, as well as success in college and career. Above and beyond the free supports that AIR’s federal technical assistance centers provide, SEL Solutions at AIR offers an approach to keep social ...
In his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, “We live in a time of extraordinary change… and whether we like it or not, the pace of this change will only accelerate.” In this blog post, AIR’s Peter Cookson says the key to dealing with this change is ...
For adult learners with dependent children, pursuing postsecondary education is complicated. An AIR study explores the fact that better supporting adult learners means making significant changes to the learner experience at postsecondary institutions, and in this blog the researchers focus specifically on findings that are particularly meaningful for parenting adult ...
The 2012 Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration program was designed to strengthen existing youth mentoring programs across the United States. In this Q&A, Manolya Tanyu describes the effectiveness of the programmatic enhancements—and the challenges of implementing them across a wide array of youth mentoring organizations. ...
At 21, many foster youth “age out” of financial benefits and supports from the child welfare system—before they even finish college. Given the challenges they face, it’s not surprising that only 3 to 10 percent of them earn undergraduate degrees compared with 34 percent of young adults who weren’t in ...