In this section, SEAs that intend to use funds under one or more of the included programs for certification and licensure systems, educator preparation program strategies, or educator growth and development systems, must provide a description with the necessary information.

Promoting and ensuring a positive educator environment is one approach to retaining highly effective educators.

A student can’t get a bad school year back. AIR works in a number of areas to develop effective educators. We work to achieve solutions to complex policy and practice problems and to support effective approaches that help teachers thrive.

As district leaders search for the best ways to improve student learning with the Common Core State Standards, some early implementers are giving us an opportunity to learn from their experience.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers are uniquely positioned to improve college and career readiness for all students, and yet major federal and state education reforms, such as the Common Core State Standards, teacher evaluation and ESEA flexibility have paid insufficient attention to d

This CALDER Center paper examines the value of strategically assigning disproportionately larger classes to the strongest teachers in order to optimize student learning in the face of differential teacher effectiveness.

Student learning objectives (SLOs) are emerging as one measure to assess teachers' contributions to student growth in educator evaluation systems. To support states and districts in developing and implementing SLOs, the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders is curating a searchable collection of SLO resources.

AIR conducted a review of key literature in 2011–12 exploring the measurement of teacher practice and student learning in arts-integrated settings through a project funded by the Department of Education and offered by the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts.

The use of student test-based measures of teacher effectiveness in personnel decisions, such as tenure, is controversial. It is a major bone of contention in the recent Chicago teacher strike. The conversation here focuses on the uses, value and limitations of these measures, often called value-added measures.

Not all student growth measures are alike, nor are they designed to be. But when student growth measures are used for educator evaluation, fairness and comparability become critical.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction contracted with AIR to provide a comprehensive evaluation of its Culturally Responsive Education for All: Training and Enhancement (CREATE) initiative during its first three years of implementation. AIR employed a qualitative case study design to assess program implementation and to determine the effect participation in the CREATE initiative had on districts’ capacities to provide culturally responsive education and to implement policies and practices designed to close achievement gaps and reduce disproportionality in special education.

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a team-based classroom behavior management strategy that helps young children master the role of student while developing the discipline needed to sit still, pay attention and complete their school work. AIR works with school districts and communities on all aspects of GBG implementation.

This study examines the impact of intensive mathematics professional development (PD) on teachers' knowledge and teaching skills for 7th grade mathematics in rational number topics such as fractions, decimals, percent, ratio, and proportion. The intensive PD studied includes over 100 hours of support in the form of summer institutes, seminars, and in-school coaching.

The final report of a study of teacher preparation in early reading instruction describes pre-service teachers' perceptions about the content of their training programs and summarizes their scores on an assessment of their knowledge of the essential components of reading instruction, as defined in the Reading First legislation.

As Baby Boom teachers begin to retire, a new generation of teachers is taking on the classroom. Generation Y teachers—those born between 1977 and 1995—are young, technologically savvy, and interested in global outcomes.

This brief presents data from a national survey of state administrators to describe trends in the implementation of the NCLB mandate for states to provide system to support to schools identified for improvement.

The main purpose of this descriptive report—based exclusively on self-reported data collected from responses to a survey administered to state educational service agency (ESA) leaders in five Great Lakes states—is to provide an overview of the structure, capacity, and roles of ESAs in the region, within the context of the broader statewide systems of support for educational improvement and progress.

Effective school leaders may be the linchpin of a successful school system. Research has identified school leadership quality as second only to teacher quality in its influence on student achievement.

This collection of policy briefs was prepared for Getting from Facts to Policy: A California Education Policy Convening, hosted by EdSource in October 2007.

National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality has compiled information about the availability, recruitment, and retention of teachers for at-risk schools and students in this inaugural biennial report.

This study reexamines the TIMSS and PISA results to correct this comparison bias by analyzing U.S. mathematics performance relative to a common set of 12 countries that participated in all three assessments.

The effort to link statistically student achievement to measures of teaching or teachers has proven very difficult. Analysts generally agree that the impacts of effective teachers on student achievement are important. The problem for analysts has been in identifying the characteristics of high quality teaching or teachers.

Developing reliable and valid national-level survey measures of instructional processes and other classroom conditions related to learning has proven exceptionally difficult. This report focuses on the size of the impact that can be expected from instruction and teachers on student achievement and on the conceptualization of measures of instruction and other classroom conditions related to learning.

AIR researchers and leaders at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began a nationwide study of teaching and learning in foundation-supported schools with a pilot study in Washington State.

Teachers' use of education technology in their classrooms and schools report examines the availability of this technology in their classrooms and schools, their training and preparation for using it, and the barriers to technology use they encounter.