Turning around our nation’s low-performing schools became a national priority—and central focus of education policy at all levels—in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. Then Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants redoubled the nation’s emphasis on school turnaround, giving states more resources to advance improvement efforts within federal ...
Successive federal efforts to tackle the entrenched challenges of persistently low-performing schools have fallen far short of their goal. In this blog post, Kerstin Le Floch and Catherine Barbour offer three ways ESEA can build capacity in low-performing schools.
To stay current on the most effective strategies for school improvement, Catherine Barbour keeps a close eye on new research. At AIR, researchers and technical assistance providers collaborate to put the most authoritative and timely information to practical use.
In 2010, the government of the Republic of Zambia implemented the Child Grant cash transfer program, the results of which offer evidence that small-scale cash transfers to poor rural households with young children can stimulate economic activity while alleviating poverty. Building on this, in 2011, the Zambian government began implementing ...
Backed by the AIR Equity Initiative, AIR is working with partners to help multisector organizations collaborate more effectively and advance health equity for Afghan refugees. In this Q&A, AIR researchers Trenita Childers and Maliha Ali share early insights from the Health Equity for Afghan Refugees (HEAR) project in the District ...
Efforts to address inequities can be siloed and aren’t always based on evidence. The AIR Equity Initiative is taking a different approach, working across systems, partnering with local organizations, and relying on the generation and use of evidence.
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.
Evidence-based policy making and evaluation are a critical part of effective public management and international development. Data and metrics provide a core foundation for planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Governments and organizations are learning to embrace more Open Data and Big Data approaches as a way to streamline and modernize ...
As part of recent reforms, states and districts are designing new approaches to holding schools and districts accountable for moving their students closer to achieving state standards in key academic domains. AIR and its partners contracted with the California Department of Education to conduct an independent evaluation of the Immediate ...
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 ...