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 ...
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.
Beth Ratway is a principal technical assistance consultant in state services at AIR. She works with Great Lakes and Midwest Comprehensive Centers to assist state education agencies and intermediate school districts with implementation of the Common Core State Standards and developing innovative 21st century systems that improve academic achievement for ...
Federal School Improvement Grants support turnaround efforts in the nation’s lowest-performing schools, including many that serve a large number of English Language Learner Students. This brief focuses on 11 of these schools with high proportions of ELLs, describing their efforts to improve teachers' capacity for serving ELLs through staffing strategies ...
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.
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 ...
Patricia Campie is a criminologist with more than 20 years of experience leading community-based research, evaluation, and implementation science initiatives. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Lowering Violence in Schools and Communities (ReSOLV) project, a five-year longitudinal study of the root causes of school violence and community, ...
The Local Control Funding Formula has introduced positive and much-needed change to California’s approach to K-12 education funding, but received criticism for being archaic, cumbersome, difficult to complete, opaque, and incoherent. A new brief from the California Collaborative on District Reform and Pivot Learning, Fostering Innovation: How User-Centered Design Can ...
This fourth and final brief in the California Collaborative on District Reform series examines how the Fresno-Long Beach Learning Partnership uses data to inform work across and within the districts. The Partnership is a collaboration that aims to improve student outcomes, accelerate achievement for all students, and close achievement gaps ...
With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program underwent three major shifts; by increasing the level of funding, better targeting these funds to the persistently lowest-achieving schools, and requiring that schools adopt specific intervention models, the revamped SIG program ...