The Midwest Comprehensive Center (MWCC) at AIR, funded through a U.S. Department of Education grant from October 2012 to September 2019, provides technical assistance for the state education agencies of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Teachers shouldn’t have to leave the classroom and become administrators to advance in their career. Effective teachers need opportunities to grow in their role across their entire career.

AIR’s approach to evaluation and growth is to make the performance evaluation process a meaningful experience rather than simply an exercise in compliance. An effective performance management system should

AIR supports districts’ efforts to strategically market their unique characteristics to attract highly effective educators.

State teacher evaluation policies have undergone sweeping changes since 2008, spurred forward heavily by federal competitive funding opportunities like Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation.

To assess teacher effectiveness in accordance with state and federal policies—such as the Race to the Top program—many states and districts are using growth and value-added models as one component of a comprehensive teacher evaluation system. 

Teachers’ individual contributions to student learning and schools’ contributions are typically intertwined. This paper explores the key issues related to strategies for identifying a value-added model to account for school and teacher contributions that create appropriate incentives for teachers. The authors recommend estimating between-school differences and then considering what part of those
differences should be attributed to teachers.

AIR and Public Agenda co-hosted a June 20, 2013 discussion on how education leaders can avoid frustration and arrive at sustainable teacher evaluation systems by engaging teachers in design and implementation. Watch what teachers and policy experts had to say about current evaluation systems, efforts to include teachers in evaluation reform, and ways to expand these efforts nationwide.

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.

The strike in Chicago, the nation's third-largest school district, raises questions about teachers unions nationwide. Jane Hannaway, a vice president of AIR, and Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education, explain how different teachers unions work.

AIR educational experts provide quick reviews of a popular new film exploring parental responses to a failing school.

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.