Governmental Agencies

The 2017–18 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) is a survey of nearly all public schools and school districts in the United States. The CRDC measures student access to courses, programs, staff, and resources that relate to Federal civil rights laws.

This cheat sheet provide the accountability, early reaction and more details on other aspect (an update of past Politics K-12 cheat sheets, including some new information on which programs made it into the agreement and which are on the chopping block) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). 

This case study examines the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's promotion of the Homebuilders type of family preservation services as the sole model worthy of public support.

This meta-analysis examines the effectiveness of school voucher programs for improving student achievement. The research is of special interest for three important reasons; (1) it examines an important policy issue relevant to educators and the public, (2) it is an example of a study designed to replicate previous research on an important topic, and (3) it highlights the importance of examining the cost effectiveness associated with implementing practices in real world settings.

Self-conscious federal efforts to promote innovation in local educational practices have resulted in little consistent or identifiable improvement in student outcomes. Although such student outcomes may be disappointing, they do not accurately reflect the potential of innovative ideas because many innovations are not implemented according to plan. This interpretation of the problem stresses the complexity of the implementation process and locates the essence of the problem not in inadequacies of innovative plans but in the bureaucratic nature of the educational system itself.

The modified Research, Development, and Diffusion (RD&D) model, as exemplified by change agents in federal organizations, was examined as a viable strategy for disseminating social program innovations. This study of seven nationally disseminated education and criminal justice projects was designed to refine the methodology for
measuring innovation implementation.

The purpose of this guide is to help district leaders take on the challenge of ensuring that students have equitable access to excellent teachers. It shares some early lessons the Education Trust has learned from districts about the levers available to prioritize low-income students and students of color in teacher quality initiatives. The guide outlines a seven-stage process that can help leaders define their own challenges, explore underlying causes, and develop strategies to ensure all schools and students have equitable access to effective teachers.

As the federal government urges states and districts to create principal evaluation systems, largely linked to student achievement, it’s also time that principals be part of the conversation. Without the inclusion of the expertise of school and instructional leaders, the new evaluation systems created across the country may not necessarily be improved or attain desired results, and, as a result, principals may not view feedback from these new evaluation systems as informative for improvement of their practice or their schools.

In this article the authors examine some design principles to guide policy-makers and school reformers who seek to promote learner-centred professional development which involves teachers as active and reflective participants in the change process.

High-quality assessments are essential to effectively educating students, measuring progress, and promoting equity. Done well and thoughtfully, they provide critical information for educators, families, the public, and students themselves and create the basis for improving outcomes for all learners. Done poorly, in excess, or without clear purpose, however, they take valuable time away from teaching and learning, and may drain creative approaches from our classrooms.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) returns decision making for our nation’s education back where it belongs – in the hands of local educators, families, and communities – while keeping the focus on students most in need.

A recently released report from the GAO finds that overall staffing in the Department of Education has fallen from a high of 6,391 in 1981 to 4,077 in 2015, while contracting levels have remained relatively stable. It is important to note that the workload for Department of Education has grown as the budget for the department has increased significantly during this same period. More eliminations of personnel are expected as the Trump administration has called for a further 13.5% reduction. It is interesting to note that the entire federal workforce has experienced a 4% reduction in staffing from 1991 through 2015, while the Department of Education lost 12% of it’s personnel.

Recent federal legislation has created strong incentives for states to adopt principal evaluation systems, many of which include new measures of principal effectiveness such as estimates of student growth and changes in school climate. Yet, there has been little research on principal evaluation systems and no state-by-state analysis of the principal evaluation systems adopted at the behest of the legislation.

Our scan reveals GYO to be a widespread strategy that has been leveraged in myriad ways in an attempt to solve teacher shortages and increase the racial and linguistic diversity of the educator workforce. While much variation exists in program design and delivery, states and districts are unified in the reason for promoting and investing in GYO: the belief that recruiting and preparing teachers from the local community will increase retention and equip schools with well-prepared teachers who are knowledgeable about the needs of students and families in the community.

The author explains in this paper that policies from on high often work against campuses being more productive. This paper ends with definite recommendations about how new governance arrangements can promote productivity. 

We strived to apply the standards uniformly to all the nation’s teacher preparation programs as part of our effort to bring as much transparency as possible to the way America’s teachers are prepared. In collecting information for this initial report, however, we encountered enormous resistance from leaders of many of the programs we sought to assess.

This article reviews U.S. administrative licensure regulations, focusing on type of school leader licensure, provider types, and leadership quality. Licensure obtained through university-based and alternative routes is examined.

In contrast to prior federally mandated school reforms, the Every Student Succeeds Act
(ESSA) allows states more discretion in reforming their lowest performing schools, removes
requirements to disrupt the status quo, and does not allocate substantial additional funds.
Using a regression discontinuity design, we evaluate a state turnaround initiative aligned
with ESSA requirements.

In 1990, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania implemented a statewide instructional support team (IST) process to provide prereferral assessment and intervention for at-risk students in 500 school districts. The current study examined the academic performance of students affected by this process as contrasted with other at-risk students who did not have access to it.

Dear Colleagues Letter: Resource Comparability is a letter written by United States Department of Education. This letter was meant to call people attention to disparities that persist in access to educational resources, and to help address those disparities and comply with the legal obligation to provide students with equal access to these resources without regard to race, color, or national origin (This letter addresses legal obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI). This letter builds on the prior work shared by the U.S. Department of Education on this critical topic.

The College board was recently released SAT scores for the high school graduating class of 2015. Both math and reading scores declined from 2014, continuing a steady downward trend that has been in place for the past decade. Pundits of contrasting political stripes seized on the scores to bolster their political agendas. Petrilli argued that falling SAT scores show that high schools needs more reform. For Burris, the declining scores were evidence of the failure of policies her organization opposes. This articles pointing out that SAT was never meant to measure national achievement and provide detail explanation. 

As special education professionals, we sometimes feel we are working in a field of dreams. This field of dreams is created by idealistic visionaries, who develop legislation, regulations, and mandates that we must put into practice in actual school settings with limited time and resources.

Missouri Code of State Regulations. (2021). Rules of Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Missouri Code of State Regulations. (2021). Rules of Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Founded in 2000 by a team of social entrepreneurs, New Leaders is a national nonprofit that develops transformational school leaders and designs effective leadership policies and practices for school systems across the country.

Every 2 years, Education requires nearly all school districts to report incidents of restraint and seclusion. Generally, restraint is restricting a student's ability to move, and seclusion is confining them alone in a space they cannot leave. The House Committee on Appropriations' explanatory statement accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 included a provision for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to evaluate the Civil Rights Data Collection's (CRDC's) restraint and seclusion data.

President Trump’s proposed America First Budget reduces the Department of Education budget by $9.2 Billion.  It is important to note in America education is primarily a State and local responsibility. The federal portion of education budget is only 1% of the total national education expenditures. Some of the programs that are at risk are Title II grants which provide funds to hire and train teachers, teacher improvement programs, summer programs, after-school and extended-learning initiatives, teacher-preparation program improvement, Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (SEOG) which offer aid to low-income undergraduates, TRIO Programs (TRIO) serving low-income individuals, first-generation college students, and individuals with disabilities, GEARUP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, and The Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Grant Program which provides non-profits resources for recruiting, selecting, and preparing or providing professional enhancement activities for teachers and principals.

School reformers and state and federal policymakers turned to standardized testing over the years to get a clearer sense of the return on a national investment in public education that reached $680 billion in 2018-19. They embraced testing to spur school improvement and to ensure the educational needs of traditionally underserved students were being met.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was a cornerstone of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” (McLaughlin, 1975). This law brought education into the forefront of the national assault on poverty and represented a landmark commitment to equal access to quality education (Jeffrey, 1978). 

NCES activities are designed to address high-priority education data needs; provide
consistent, reliable, complete, and accurate indicators of education status and trends; and
report timely, useful, and high-quality data to the US Department of Education, the Congress,
the states, other education policymakers, practitioners, data users, and the general public.

This essay seeks to help you put the hard-earned experience of others to use through a set of practical steps, prompts, and tips for matching the right evaluator to your need.

In Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch argues that the crisis in American education is not a crisis of academic achievement but a concerted effort to destroy public schools in this country. She makes clear that, contrary to the claims being made, public school test scores and graduation rates are the highest they've ever been, and dropout rates are at their lowest point.

 A raft of initiatives and reforms have been introduced in many countries to attract and recruit school teachers, many of which do not have a clear evidence base, so their effectiveness remains unclear. Prior research has been largely correlational in design. This paper describes a rigorous and comprehensive review of international evidence, synthesizing the findings of some of the strongest empirical work so far.

This annual publication is thedefinitive compendium of data on virtually every aspects of education from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. Its chapters include: All Levels of Education, Elementary and Secondary Education, Postsecondary Education, Federal Funds for Education and Related Activities, Outcomes of Education, International Comparisons of Education, and Libraries and Use of Technology. 

Presented are 12 author contributed chapters which developed out of an invisible college of leaders concerned with providing services to the severely, profoundly, and multiply handicappe

A child shall qualify as an individual with exceptional needs, pursuant to Education Code section 56026, if the results of the assessment as required by Education Code section 56320 demonstrate that the degree of the child's impairment as described in subdivisions (b)(1) through (b)(13) requires special education in one or more of the program options authorized by Education Code section 56361.

On September 23, 2011, the U.S. Department of Education offered each interested State educational agency  the opportunity to request flexibility on behalf of itself, its local educational agencies, and its schools, in order to better focus on improving student learning and increasing the quality of instruction. This voluntary opportunity will provide educators and State and local leaders with flexibility regarding specific requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, in exchange for rigorous and comprehensive State-developed plans designed to improve educational outcomes for all students, close achievement gaps, increase equity, and improve the quality of instruction.

In certain states and districts, and in particular specialties like special education or foreign
languages, teacher shortages are a recurring fact of life. An Education Week analysis of
federal data finds that all 50 states and most territories reported experiencing statewide
shortages in one teaching area or another for either the 2016-17 school year, the current
one, or both.

In early February, the IDEA hosted website that provides special education resources disappeared prompting concern among some in the special education community and members of Congress that the new administration was permanently eliminating this support for special education. After a prolonged outage, the U.S. Department of Education Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) website, has been revamped and is now back online. The website offers useful information on special education law and policy, topic area reports, grants and funding resources, links to outside resources, and a blog for use by policy makers, parents and educators.