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AIR examines 16 successful applications from the Race to the Top District awards. Four trends mark grantees' efforts to implement teaching and learning innovations, including blended learning environments, individualized career readiness plans, and empowering stakeholders.

To address concerns about rising health care costs, quality of care, and inefficient spending, policymakers and health care providers have called for “delivery system reform”—changes in the way health care is provided and paid for in the United States. The Affordable Care Act established several initiatives to identify new payment ...

Early warning systems offer a way to use available data to identify students at risk and drive targeted interventions that help them get back on track. This issue paper includes lessons learned from more than seven years of working with individual schools, school districts, and state education agencies as they ...

AIR and Turnaround for Children have authored two white papers to support districts who are applying for the Race to the Top – District (RTTD) competition. The two white papers provide guidelines for establishing foundational conditions as outlined by RTTD and for using a specific set of metrics to measure ...

In April 2010, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted regulations to formalize the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s approach to engaging with all schools to improve student performance. AIR conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of how some of the lowest-performing schools use School Redesign Grants (SRGs) ...

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has an ongoing commitment to improve support provided to all schools, with an emphasis on the lowest performing schools. This report summarizes findings from AIR’s qualitative analyses of turnaround practices that appear challenging for low-performing high schools, as well as promising practices ...

Building on existing external school support literature, this brief offers a set of indicators for assessing the quality of support provided to low-performing schools, with respect to the No Child Left Behind Act.

Exclusionary school discipline policies once instituted to prevent serious infractions have crept into discipline practices for minor issues. Youth who participated in a roundtable on the subject contend that it limits opportunities to learn and compromises academic achievement; is applied disproportionately and subjectively; and deprives students of the ...