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."
This is the second of two conversations by current and former colleagues Robert “Bob” Kim and Terris Ross. Kim, an AIR Institute Fellow, served as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration. Their first conversation focused on policy ...
Though most public school principals believe that effective leadership of their schools requires authority over personnel decisions, they report having little such authority in practice. That's a key finding of a new study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and AIR. Based on a series of interviews with a small ...
Student agency, or the ability to manage one’s learning, can have significant effects on academic achievement as students take an active role in seeking and internalizing new knowledge. The purpose of this study was to identify the instructional practices that may be useful for the development of different aspects of ...
The American Institutes for Research (AIR) has issued a policy brief summarizing the findings of its research on structuring instructional resources and practices for full-day kindergarten programs to increase children's reading achievement and better prepare them for first grade.
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. ...
Conducting research and providing technical assistance in developing countries has long been challenging and unpredictable. Here, experts from AIR and local staff in the field share learned lessons this year about creative solutions to research problems that they will carry with them when encountering future challenges. ...
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 ...
A federal higher education grant program designed to improve postsecondary educational opportunities, particularly for underserved populations, is meeting and sometimes exceeding its goals, according to a study of the program completed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for the U.S. Department of Education. ...
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 ...