This paper introduces performance architecture as a framework that allows someone to assess all features of an organization so that the parts of the system can be aligned to support an innovation. 

This paper explores an alternative principal development program that combines the development of shared leadership and individual leaders as schools pursue their learning-improvement agendas.

This paper discusses the search for a “magic metric” in education: an index/number that would be generally accepted as the most efficient descriptor of school’s performance in a district.

This paper presents RtI as a continuous evaluation cycle: problem identification, problem analysis, goal setting, plans implementation and plan evaluation.

Reform efforts tend to come and go very quickly in education. This paper makes the argument that the sustainability of programs is closely related to how well those programs are implemented.

Increasing education’s reliance on evidence to guide decisions requires a significant change in the culture of districts and schools. This paper reviews the implications of moving toward evidence-based education.

This paper discusses common elements of successfully sustaining effective practices across a variety of disciplines.

This paper examines the evidence-based education issues that come into play with the implementation of a Positive Behavior Support school culture.

This paper considers issues confronted by National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) upon publishing their second edition of Teacher Prep Review, a comprehensive evaluation of programs that train new teachers. Changing the culture of teacher preparation has proven to be extremely challenging. The paper examines the deeply entrenched preparation program culture that has been resistant to changes proposed by policy makers, school systems, and the public. Arthur reviews the current state of teacher preparation, the efforts of NCTQ to raise the standards of preparation, and looks at what can be done in the future to continue the progress that has been already achieved.

This paper identifies the critical role State Education Agencies play in successful school culture change and discusses a framework for "change leadership".

This paper provides an overview of "lessons learned" from efforts to sustain and scale-up a school-wide continuum of evidence-based behavioral practices and systems in schools.

This article discuss about the history of California spending on school facilities and the impact of the situation. 

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 report highlights the very important role that states play in cultivating principal leadership talent. This paper speaks concern about improving human resources management at the state and district levels, doing quality control at the entry requirements, and give states tools and strategies to re-frame policies to bolster the principal talent pipeline. 

This paper discusses the potential and challenges of a “cohesive leadership system” which coordinates leadership standards, training, and conditions at both the State and district levels. Effective coordination of these components, then, has the potential to both speed and make more permanent the benefits to the learning of all students.

This report is a call to action for chiefs and an invitation to our colleagues, especially members of NASBE and NGA who contributed to this report. The recommendations contained in this report focus on the levers for change that are the responsibility of state education agencies (SEAs) and, where applicable, their partner professional standards boards: licensure; program approval; and data collection, analysis, and reporting.

This paper offer a number of research findings and action steps drawn from policies and practices that have been shown to be critical to the success of educational reforms at the local, district and state levels.

Research supports that school districts' prereferral consultation teams adhere less closely to quality consultation procedures and are less effective than those conducted through university research projects. This study investigated whether this finding might be due to incompatibilities between school settings and recommended team consultation practices.

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). 

With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states gain considerably more authority and autonomy over the design of school accountability systems. This shift in responsibility creates the opportunity for states to reimagine new accountability models that align to goals of college and career readiness for all students and to move from a culture of compliance to one of continuous improvement. 

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 article discuss about The State Board of Education advise to make changes to Ohio's new and more rigorous graduation requirements. This article show the conditions that the board ignore, and the problem lies in the other options recommended by the board. This article also give suggestion to create a tiered diploma system based on current graduation requirements. 

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of distributed leadership (DL) on school effectiveness (SE) in junior secondary schools in Katsina State, Nigeria. The study also investigates if teachers’ commitment (TC) mediates the relationship between DL and SE.

One-third of teachers told Education Week in July they were somewhat or very likely to leave their job this year, compared with just 8% who leave the profession in a typical year. But while that survey might reflect teachers' feelings over the summer, a review of the retirement and staffing figures collected in some of the first states to resume classes this year suggests that fears of a mass exodus of retiring teachers may have been overblown.  

This paper has three objectives: (1) to create set of policies and initiatives by document the actions taken by Wallace Foundation, (2) to describe how states and districts have worked together to forge more-cohesive policies and initiatives aroung school leadership, (3)to examine the hypothesis that more-cohesive systems do in fact improve school leadership.

Low ventilation rates (VRs) in schools have been associated with absenteeism, poorer academic performance, and teacher dissatisfaction. The steady-state, build-up, and decay methods had significant limitations and biases, showing the need to confirm that these methods are appropriate. Findings highlight the need to increase VRs and to ensure that energy saving and comfort measures do not compromise ventilation and IAQ.

Trends in College Pricing provides information on changes over time in undergraduate tuition and fees, room and board, and other estimated expenses related to attending colleges and universities. The report, which includes data through 2018-19 from the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges, reveals the wide variation in prices charged by institutions of different types and in different parts of the country. 

As 2021 begins, we can’t make assumptions about what students have learned this school year. Education leaders and teachers, of course, have interacted with students and watched them through computer screens for many months — but we won’t truly know what happened and where learning gaps exist without statewide exams.

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.

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002 and its 2015 update, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), every third through eighth grader in U.S. public schools now takes tests calibrated to state standards, with the aggregate results made public. In a study of the nation’s largest urban school districts, students took an average of 112 standardized tests between pre-K and grade 12.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a meta analysis study with the goal of providing state and local education leaders with scientifically-based evidence regarding the effects of teacher professional development on improving student learning. The analysis focused on completed studies of effects of professional development for K-12 teachers of science and mathematics.

This paper seeks to estimate the effect that Career Leader (CL) program has had on teachers’ career decisions, specifically their decisions to stay in a specific school district or to remain in the teaching field.

This report examines the efficiency of the nation's public education system

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.

During recent decades, the notion of team leadership has emerged as a central theme in the international discourse on systemic education reform. This issue of Research in Educational Administration and Leadership not only captures a collective sense of commitment to education as means for advancing national social, economic, and political wellbeing but also reflects a changing nature of leadership across a wide spectrum of educational organizations and contexts. 

Districts and states establish minimum eligibility requirements for individuals serving as principals in public schools. The intent of these requirements—which include mandated degrees, prior teaching and/or administrative experience, and certifications—is to ensure a minimum quality standard in the principal candidate pool.

Effective teacher professional development is defined as structured professional learning
activities which result in changes in teacher practice and improvements in student learning
outcomes. Superintendents face common challenges unique to the rural environment which
hinder the delivery of effective teacher professional development in rural school districts.

This chapter provides insights to the questions posed regarding implementation and ongoing practice of RTI, both at the state and local levels.

In this chapter of "Distributed leadership: Different perspectives" the authors take a small step towards addressing such questions by investigating the association between the distribution of leadership to teachers and instructional change in schools.

This review assesses the effectiveness of school-based curricula, finance, management, and teacher’s decision-making. This report has implications for the impact of charter schools, as the primary intervention in this model is local control. The report finds limited evidence of the effectiveness of these reforms, especially from low-income countries.

This paper discusses the search for a “magic metric” in education: an index/number that would be generally accepted as the most efficient descriptor of school’s performance in a district.

This report provides a practical “management guide,” for an evidence-based key indicator data decision system for school districts and schools.

Thorough and comprehensive, this book offers essential information about how to form leadership teams, identify high stakes problems, build commitment, create a school-wide vision and establish school-wide goals, handle setbacks, maintain the vision and sustain change, evaluate and assess comprehensive school change.

With Congress moving rapidly to revise the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), no issue has proven more contentious than whether the federal government should continue to require that states test all students in math and reading annually in grades three through eight.

The most recent incarnation of ESEA, signed into law in January of 2002 by President George W. Bush, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). We’re now 13 years into NCLB, so reauthorization is long overdue. It is not just the long delay that argues for congressional action, but the extent to which the Obama administration has replaced the provisions of the bill with its own set of priorities implemented through Race to the Top and state waivers. 

A report by the Brown Center on Education Policy released in September 2014 finds that school superintendents are around for only a short time and have very little impact when it comes to improving student performance.

Through real-life single and multiple case studies, This book addresses how principals and their staffs struggle with the challenge of shared leadership, how they encourage teacher growth and development, and how shared leadership can lead to higher levels of student learning. 

This is the first comprehensive national report to scrutinize the impact of strict Zero Tolerance approach in the America public school. This report illustrate that Zero Tolerance is unfair, is contrary to developmental needs of children, denies children educational opportunities, and often results in the criminalization of children. 

This brief explores research that points to the opportunities and the challenges that evaluating teacher preparation programs differently presents.

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 report, the author aim to provide an accessible introduction to these new measures of teaching quality and put them into the broader context of concerns over school quality and achievement gaps.

The Proficiency Illusion reveals that the tests that states use to measure academic progress under the No Child Left Behind Act are creating a false impression of success, especially in reading and especially in the early grades.

Taking Response to Intervention to Scale: Developing and Implementing a Quality Response-to-Intervention Process

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is an authentic tool for evaluating prospective teachers by examining their abilities to plan, teach, assess, and reflect on instruction in actual classroom practice. The PACT seeks both to measure and develop teacher effectiveness, and this study of its predictive and consequential validity provides information on how well it achieves these goals.

This article examines the politics of principal evaluation through both an extensive review of the literature and in-depth interviews with principals and superintendents. The findings reveal that the format and processes used in principal evaluation often vary from one district to another and that principals and superintendents frequently hold different perspectives about the purposes and usefulness of evaluation.

Race to the Top will reward States that have demonstrated success in raising student achievement and have the best plans to accelerate their reforms in the future. These States will offer models for others to follow and will spread the best reform ideas across their States, and across the country.

Over the last fifty years, there have been many educational reform efforts, most of which have had a relatively short lifespan and failed to produce the promised results. One possible reason for this is for the most part these innovations have been poorly implemented. In this chapter, the author proposes a data-based decision making approach to assuring high quality implementation.

Reform efforts tend to come and go very quickly in education. This paper makes the argument that the sustainability of programs is closely related to how well those programs are implemented.

Almost every state in the United States has revamped its principal evaluation policies since 2009, yet we know little about how they are implemented. Based on interviews and document analysis in 21 small- and medium-sized school districts, we found that superintendents’ sense making shaped their implementation of policy.

In the past decade, nearly all states have revised their principal evaluation policies, prompting school districts across the country to rethink how they are evaluating school leaders. The new principal evaluation systems that emerge out of these policy reforms often couple increased accountability with a greater emphasis on development in an effort to spur continuous improvement in school leadership practices.

The idea of improving schools by developing professional learning communities is currently in vogue. People use this term to describe every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education—a grade-level teaching team, a school committee, a high school department, an entire school district, a state department of education, a national professional organization, and so on.

The largest Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) expenditure by far is for its Title I program. This report try to follow the money to see whether Title I funds are spent effectively and whether or not ESEA achieves its objectives. This report suggest focusing effective interventions on the neediest students may provide a way forward that is consistent with fiscal realities.

On several issues, our analysis teases out nuances in public opinion by asking variations of questions to randomly selected segments of survey participants. We divided respondents at random into two or more segments and asked each group a different version of the same general question.

The opinion article discuss about anti-vaxxers activist grow more aggressive while more study and evidence show how vaccination is important. The author suggest that the Lawmakers must stand up to the anti-vaccination crowd, a very small minority according to every poll. 

The theory that measuring performance and coupling it to rewards and sanctions will cause schools and the individuals who work in them to perform at higher levels underpins performance based accountability systems. Such systems are now operating in most states and in thousands of districts, and they represent a significant change from traditional approaches to accountability.

We investigated the effects of a statewide program designed to increase the supply of
teachers in “hard-to-staff” areas.

The average public school building was built around 1968 — more than 50 years ago — and the National Center for Education Statistics reports that half of all public schools in the United States need at least one major facility repair. This text explains how poorly maintained school buildings have a negative effect on both student and teacher performance and health. 

This paper discusses common elements of successfully sustaining effective practices across a variety of disciplines.

The purpose of this Brief is to define the variables a state or large district leadership team may wish to consider as they determine if they are “ready” to invest in the scaling-up of innovation in education.

The publication of this report marks the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. This report shows that the growth of racial and economic segregation that began then has now continued unchecked for nearly three decades, placing the promise of Brown at grave risk. Research shows that segregation has strong, negative relationships with the achievement, college success, long-term employment and income of students of color. 

This research has profound implications for states and districts implementing principal evaluation systems, particularly those making high-stakes decisions about principals based on statistical estimates of principal effectiveness. Indeed, such statistical estimates should be used not for making judgments or decisions about principals but rather as a screening tool to identify where states and districts should focus more in-depth and accurate strategies to evaluate principal effectiveness.

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 primary purpose is to examine the degree to which state equity plans identify the distribution of principals and principal turnover as factors influencing three leadership mechanisms that affect student access to effective teachers—namely, hiring of teachers, building instructional capacity of teachers, and managing teacher turnover.

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.

This book was written to disseminate measurably superior instructional strategies to those 
interested in advancing sound, pedagogically effective, field-tested educational practices

A report entitled A Nation at Risk was published based on information distilled from commissioned research papers and public hearings. The report contains summaries of the papers and hearings; a list of findings in content, expectations, time, and teaching; a set of recommendations; and aspects of implementation related to con

This article discuss recent state legislation that passed to put additional restriction to the charter school.It is the author's opinion that this legislation will not fix the underlying problems. 

This paper highlights the limitations of district-level data on principals encountered during data collection for a study on principal preparation programs. 

This article describes the procedures and utility of the Benchmarks of Quality as part of a comprehensive evaluation plan to assess the universal level of implementation fidelity of behavior support for a school. However, results can also be examined to determine the level of implementation fidelity across a district or state for ongoing behavioral training and technical assistance planning.

In one three-week period, a pandemic has completely changed the national landscape on assessment.

There is mounting evidence of substantial “teacher quality gaps” (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged students but practically no empirical evidence about their history. We use longitudinal data on public school students, teachers, and schools from two states—North Carolina and Washington—to provide a descriptive history of the evolution of TQGs in these states.

A significant and eye-opening examination of the current state of the testing movement in the
United States, where more than 150 million standardized intelligence, aptitude, and
achievement tests are administered annually by schools, colleges, business and industrial
firms, government agencies, and the military services. 

Discusses the uses and abuses of intelligence testing in our educational systems. Dr. Goslin
examines teachers' opinions and practices with regard to tests and finds considerable
discrepancies between attitude and behavior.

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.

In schools throughout the country, it is testing season--time for students to take the Big Standardized Test (the PARCC, SBA, or your state's alternative). This ritual really blossomed way back in the days of No Child Left Behind, but after all these years, teachers are mostly unexcited about it. There are many problems with the testing regimen, but a big issue for classroom teachers is that the tests do not help the teacher do her job.

Recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers is essential for student learning. As a 2019 Learning Policy Institute analysis found, “Investments in instruction, especially high-quality teachers, appear to leverage the largest marginal gains in [student] performance.” Research has shown that teacher cuts during the last recession disproportionately impacted districts and schools serving students of color and students from low-income families. 

Test-based accountability systems that attach high stakes to standardized test results have
raised a number of issues on educational assessment and accountability. Do these high-
stakes tests measure student achievement accurately? How can policymakers and
educators attach the right consequences to the results of these tests? And what kinds of
tradeoffs do these testing policies introduce? 

The every student succeeds act (ESSA), passed into law in 2015, explicitly prohibits the federal government from creating incentives to set national standards. The law represents a major departure from recent federal initiatives, such as Race to the Top, which beginning in 2009 encouraged the adoption of uniform content standards and expectations for performance.

Transforming education is one of the signature challenges of our times. This book sets out exactly and undeniably why the only way to do it is to honor and improve the profession of teaching. Written by two of the sharpest educational thinkers in the world, this book is an incisive critique of the failing reform movements in many countries and a powerful manifesto for the only strategy that can and does work.

In 2011, as a part of the State Board of Education's implementation of North Carolina's Race to the Top initiative, a sixth standard—a measure of student growth, the Educational Value-Added Assessment System—was added to the existing five standards for evaluating teachers. The purpose of this report is to describe the outcomes of teacher evaluations that have occurred since the sixth standard was added and trends in those outcomes through 2013-14.

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.

States and districts across the country are implementing new principal evaluation systems that include measures of the quality of principals' school leadership practices and measures of student achievement growth. Because these evaluation systems will be used for high- stakes decisions, it is important that the component measures of the evaluation systems fairly and accurately differentiate between effective and ineffective principals.

This article discusses the current focus on using teacher observation instruments as part of new teacher evaluation systems being considered and implemented by states and districts. 

Like proponents of standards-based reform in other states, Washington State policy and business leaders assumed that the establishment of a performance-based system would change the behavior of teachers, parents, school administrators, and students.

In this book E.D. Hirsch, the author of Cultural Literacy, makes a case against much of what schools are now trying to do to improve education. Lifelong learning, multiple intelligences, learning style, metacognitive skills, cooperative learning, critical thinking, and learning to learn will do little for students, he says.

Who decides what education products and services schools buy? For the most part, it’s district purchasing agents, school principals, technology coordinators, and bureaucrats—anyone but the end user in the classroom. It’s an ineffective market, with products and services handed down to teachers from purchasing decisionmakers on high.

Practicing school psychologists were surveyed to determine if differences exist among practitioners in the various U.S. Census regions. 

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has been languishing for years, and Congress may now end up rewriting the law to fix its many flaws. However, it's now been discredited to the point that almost all states now receive waivers that allow them to miss key elements of the law without any punishments.

In order to learn more about how school districts support educator data use, we examined the intersection of data use and professional learning in three school districts. We found that a chasm exists in how educators frame―data use, with some framing data use as a student-oriented improvement process, and others framing it as a mere exercise in the accountability of teacher programs.

This article reports on a longitudinal study designed to explore these questions. In 1999, researchers from The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers selected and interviewed a diverse group of 50 new teachers in the Massachusetts public schools.

The primary obstacle to faster progress in U.S. education reform is hard to put your finger on, because it’s an absence, not a presence. It is not an interest group or a manifest social problem. It is the infrastructure we never built for identifying what works. It is the organizational framework we’ve not yet constructed for building consensus among education leaders across the country to identify what’s working.

In recent years, most states have constructed elaborate accountability systems using school-level test scores. We evaluate the implications for school accountability systems. For instance, rewards or sanctions for schools with scores at either extreme primarily affect small schools and provide weak incentives to large ones.

ESSA got rid of the requirement in the law it replaced, the No Child Left Behind Act, that teachers must be highly qualified, which typically meant they needed to have a bachelor’s degree in the subject they are teaching and state certification. Instead, states must come up with their own definition of an “effective teacher.”

For decades we’ve been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there’s still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they’re doing is actually working.

In recent years, states have sought to increase accountability for public school teachers by implementing a package of reforms centered on high-stakes evaluation systems. We examine the effect of these reforms on the supply and quality of new teachers.

This report recommend thirteen specific steps the federal government can take to develop new methods to define and measure such outcomes, use federal resources to build and apply evidence of what works, and help colleges and universities invest in student outcomes.

We did not ask the panel to weigh in on debates over the role of state exams and accountability systems during a pandemic. However, the panel did discuss how districts and states can balance the goal of informing teachers and parents about individual students with the continued need to track system and school progress. The challenges in the upcoming school year will shine a harsh light on the variation in skills, knowledge, and needs that were always present.

Plaintiffs, representing the class of black children in California who have been or in the future will be wrongly placed and maintained in special classes for the "educable mentally retarded" ("E.M.R.") challenge the placement process for those classes and particularly certain uses of standardized individual intelligence ("I.Q.") tests in California.

A study of 27 promising programs reveals 8 common reasons that educational innovations fail, including disenchanted practitioners; departure of innovation supporters; lack of personnel training; disappearing funding; inadequate supervision; and lack of accountability, administrative support, and termination consequences. Innovations succeed by avoiding overload, complementing school mission, and securing board approval

In undertaking this study, two goals were established: (1) to obtain a better understanding of how much time students spend taking tests; and (2) to identify the degree to which the tests are mandated by districts or states. 

This paper examines the evidence-based education issues that come into play with the implementation of a Positive Behavior Support school culture.

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.

Performance assessments such as the Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) are used by state departments of education as one measure of competency to grant teaching certification. Although the edTPA is used as a summative assessment, research studies in other forms of performance assessments, such as the Performance Assessment for California Teachers and the National Board Certification for Professional Teaching Standards  have shown that they can be used as learning tools for both preservice and experienced teachers and as a form of feedback for teacher education programs.

This article elaborate on a topic "What to expect in Common Core immediate political future". Here, they discuss four key challenges that CCSS will face between now and the end of the year. Common Core is now several years into implementation.  Supporters have had a difficult time persuading skeptics that any positive results have occurred. The best evidence has been mixed on that question. The political challenges that Common Core faces the remainder of this year may determine whether it survives.

Many schools and teachers are striving to create more dynamic classroom learning environments that encourage students to think critically and manage their own learning in preparation for college and careers. Some observers view formative assessment as a means to this end.

this report identifies three crucial areas leaders across all states can usefully consider as they seek answers to some key questions. The report emphasizes that every state faces a unique blend of educational, political and financial circumstances and that, therefore, each state's approach should fit its needs and particularities.

The authors show school and district-level administrators how to set the priorities and support the practices that will help all teachers become expert teachers. Their five-part framework is based on what research tells us about how expertise develops. 

States and districts across the country are revising how they evaluate school principals. Those that are doing so face a substantial challenge: there is scant evidence on the validity and reliability of current principal evaluation tools. Pennsylvania is among states that are developing a new tool for evaluating principals and assistant principals.

This annual publication is one of the best ongoing sources for tracking and analyzing important developments and trends in education over time using the latest available data. In 2019 the spotlights were on: “Early Childhood Care Arrangements”; “Choices and Costs Characteristics of Public School Teachers Who Completed Alternative Route to Certification Programs”; and “Trends in Student Loan Debt for Graduate School Completers.”

This short guide, based on what we have learned from two decades of work on this issue, provides a few ideas on what could be included in a good plan. Our recommendations are grouped into three categories: Analyze, Build, and Create.

The edTPA is a performance assessment of teaching used variously by some state education departments and institutions of higher education for licensure testing and evaluating teaching candidates. The edTPA artifacts include written commentaries, lesson plans, video segments, and samples of student work, based on a series of three to five consecutive lessons.

This report describes how the seven Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central states (Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming) evaluate their teacher preparation programs and the changes they are making to improve their approaches to evaluation.

This paper addresses one key driver of spending variation between schools: shared district resources.

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

Assessment, or testing, fulfills a vital role in today’s educational environment. Assessment results often are a major force in shaping public perceptions about the capabilities of our students and the quality of our schools. As a primary tool for educators and policymakers, assessment is used for many important purposes.

Assessments used in Missouri are designed to measure how well students acquire the skills and knowledge described in Missouri’s Learning Standards (MLS). The assessments yield information on academic achievement at the student, class, school, district and state levels.

In this article, the authors examine leadership for effective learning employing research on highly productive schools and districts and high-performing principals and superintendents.

Since 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has compared each state's standard for proficient performance in reading and mathematics at grades 4 and 8 by placing the state standards onto common scales from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This process of "state mapping" shows where each state's standards fall on the NAEP scales and in relation to the NAEP achievement levels— NAEP Basic, NAEP Proficient, and NAEP Advanced—providing important contributions to the discussion of state standards.

Totals presented in this indicator include imputations for states for which data were unavailable. See reference tables in the Digest of Education Statistics.

Current expenditures for education can be expressed in terms of the percentage of funds going toward salaries, employee benefits, purchased services, tuition, supplies, or other expenditures.

The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) provided states with newfound flexibility on accountability measures and school improvement strategies. Many policy experts have analyzed states’ ESSA plans, which explain how states use their federal funds under various provisions of the new law, as well as the approaches states take to identify and rate schools and improve their performance where needed.

This REL Northwest guide is designed to help educators use data to reduce disproportionate rates of suspension and expulsion based on race or ethnicity. It provides examples of selecting and analyzing data to determine whether racial disproportionality exists in a school or district’s discipline practices. 

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.

This report examines: (1) patterns in disciplinary actions among public K-12 schools; (2) challenges selected school districts have with student behavior and how they approach school discipline; and (3) actions the Departments of Education and Justice have taken to identify and address disparities or discrimination in school discipline.

Good news coming from the Ohio Department of Education that the long-awaited Charter School program (CSP) grant funds will be soon available. However, the bad news is based on the announced criteria, hardly anyone will qualify for the money. 

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). 

As states and districts consider potential changes to their teacher evaluation systems and policies, this paper seeks to inform those efforts by reviewing the evolution of the teacher evaluation policy movement over the last several years, identifying positive outcomes of new systems and negative consequences, and describing risks that should be considered. 

The education reform movement of the past two decades has focused on raising academic
standards. Some standards advocates attach a testing mechanism to gauge the extent to
which high standards are actually accomplished, whereas some critics accuse the push for
standards and testing of impeding reform and perpetuating inequality.

This report, one of six state-of-the-field reports, explores the connection between learning-focused leadership and leadership assessment as it contributes to coherent leadership assessment systems. The report outlines the function and implication of leadership assessment in national, state and local contexts.

The on-going efforts to improve Student Support Teams (SST) within a large, urban California school district are presented. The major goal of this reform has been to reshape the SSTs to focus on empirically supported interventions and data based decision making rather than student deficit and disability.

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.

With an unprecedented data set, Stanford researchers review more than 200 million test scores to spotlight communities with the nation’s worst academic achievement gaps. The research also revealed that nearly all U.S. school districts with substantial minority populations have large achievement gaps between their white and black and white and Hispanic students.

Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools. No Child Left Behind required schools to administer yearly state standardized tests. Student progress on those tests was measured to see if the schools met their Adequate Yearly Progress goals. or AYP. Schools missing those goals for several years in a row could be restructured, replaced or shut down.

Thinking, particularly reflective thinking or inquiry, is essential to both teachers’ and students’ learning. In the past 10 to 15 years numerous commissions, boards, and foundations as well as states and local school districts have identified reflection/inquiry as a standard toward which all teachers and students must strive.

Whether they are termed regional or assistant superintendents, area directors, instructional leadership supervisors, executive officers, or some other title, a leadership hierarchy is employed in school districts in the United States whereby principals report to and are managed or supported by principal supervisors. Traditionally, this role has primarily been one of representing the demands or expectations of the central office to the school by focusing on providing information about district initiatives and ensuring compliance.

This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement.

This report is the first in a series by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) that examines the current status of states' teacher policies. Updated on a two-year cycle, each will cover a specific area of teacher policy. This report focuses on state teacher policies governing what states require in evaluations of both teachers and principals.

This document presents the first results of a series of studies on within-district spending patterns. It provides an overview of some early analysis of variations in spending among schools within three unnamed school districts.

This document presents the first results of a series of studies on within-district spending patterns. It provides an overview of some early analysis of variations in spending among schools within three unnamed school districts.

This paper focuses on one aspect of district spending ambiguity, namely, differences in per-pupil spending masked by teacher salary cost averaging. 

Often principals in urban school districts report to a central office staff person whose primary function is to supervise principals. Over the past decade, the principal supervisor role has shifted away from administrative oversight toward developing principals’ instructional leadership capacity. As principals are increasingly responsible for driving improvement in their schools, the demands of supervising principals similarly have changed.

This article sketches out a framework for inclusive leadership. As one of the constellation approaches to leadership and social justice, inclusive leadership is concerned first and foremost with inclusion, both in its processes and the ends for which it strives.

As school districts work out next year's instructional format and take stock of their teacher workforce, districts in a position to hire are also readying themselves for a potentially unprepared influx of novice teachers. School administrators have the difficult task of ensuring that new teachers are effective regardless of setting, while also having to bridge the learning loss exacerbated by last spring's dramatic turn of school.

The bulk of the study is dedicated to an analysis of the empirical research literature on leadership effects. This includes the presentation of results from an earlier meta-analysis carried out by the authors, a summary of other meta-analyses, and a new meta-analysis based upon 25 studies carried out between 2005 and 2010.

Education created RTT under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide incentives for states to reform K-12 education in areas such as improving the lowest performing schools and developing effective teachers and leaders. In 2010, Education awarded 12 states nearly $4 billion in RTT grant funds to spend over 4 years. A state's RTT application and scope of work included the state's plans for development and
implementation of teacher and principal evaluation systems by participating school districts

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.

The authors use principals’ self-ratings to construct typologies of effectiveness in both domains and compare their relationship to student achievement. Results show that principals view themselves as either strong or weak on instructional leadership and organizational management skills simultaneously. They also find that learning gains vary significantly across the principal profiles.

School board members and their attitudes do matter—so it’s important to take seriously who gets elected and how. Even as we strive to bring about structural reforms and governance innovations in the education system, we should also be working to get better results from the structures in place in most communities today.

This article presents a systematic review of research on the achievement outcomes of all
types of approaches to teaching science in elementary schools. Study inclusion criteria
included use of randomized or matched control groups, a study duration of at least 4 weeks,
and use of achievement measures independent of the experimental treatment.

This 4-year longitudinal study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, is designed to make the “black box” of leadership practice more transparent through an in-depth analysis of leadership practice. This research identifies the tasks, actors, actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. 

Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper develops a distributed perspective on school leadership as a frame for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice is constituted in the interaction of school leaders, followers, and the situation.

This report, completed by the Center on Education Policy, attempts to provide an initial snapshot of the number and percentages of schools each states has identified low performing. It provides an early look at a very diverse set of guidelines.  The data show a wide range of results in terms of the percentage of schools identified as low performing. The overall range is 3% to 99%, with individual states spread out fairly evenly in between. Eight states identified over 40% of their public schools as low performing, eleven states 20%–40%, fifteen states 11%–19%, and thirteen states 3%–10%. Even with the limitations of the data listed above, this data suggests inconsistent standards across states.

Despite New York’s wrong turn, the $6 billion for Reading First has more generally been one of the best investments ever in federal education spending. It has already brought some remarkable reading breakthroughs in many parts of the country and among at-risk students.

There are growing calls from across the political spectrum for the federal government to allow states to skip giving students federally mandated standardized tests in spring 2021 — but the man that President-elect Joe Biden tapped to be education secretary has indicated support for giving them.

This article focuses on the systemic implementation features of SWPBS as a means of increasing the accurate adoption and sustained implementation of effective behavioral practices at the individual student, classroom, and school-wide levels. This article describes SWPBS, suggest how SWPBS might be implemented at broader systems levels, and discuss research and practice implications.

This report provides state and district policymakers in Texas with updated information on trends in teacher mobility and on correlates of mobility in the teaching workforce, offering a systematic baseline for monitoring and planning.

Based on a synthesis of unpublished transformational school leadership (TSL) research completed during the last 14 years, this study inquired into the nature of TSL and its effects on student achievement using review methods including standard meta-analysis and vote-counting techniques. 

This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s mixed-method evaluation of the Distributed Leadership (DL) project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation.

This article highlights a framework of general phases and specific steps for di  usion of major new approaches across a school district. The overlapping phases are seen as encompassing: (a) creating readiness, (b) initial implementation, (c) institutionalization, and (d) ongoing evolution. The discussion includes lessons learned in applying the framework.

A subgroup of principals—leaders for social justice—guide their schools to transform the culture, curriculum, pedagogical practices, atmosphere, and schoolwide priorities to benefit marginalized students. The purpose of the article is to develop a theory of this social justice educational leadership.

The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has forced school districts across the nation to quickly adapt their approach to teaching and learning, with widespread variation in the response. With a new school year now underway, several states require that schools provide some degree of in-person instruction, while other states have left such decisions up to local education and public health officials.

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

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of educational leadership, administration and management (EdLAM) research by identifying thematic strands that hallmark key publications and synthesise major research findings and limitations. 

This article provides a meta-analysis of research conducted on distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013. It continues the review of distributed leadership commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership (NCSL) which identified two gaps in the research during the 1996–2002 period.

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.

The third in a series of reports evaluating a multi-year Wallace initiative documents ways in which six districts are working to improve school leadership districtwide. 

This report highlight suggestions from Nora Gordon report  "Increasing Targeting, Flexibility, and Transparency in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to Help Disadvantaged Students.". The paper argues that effective local decisions about spending Title I funds have the biggest "bang for the buck", but that Washington and the states can do better to help locals make better decisions without running afoul of the grants program's requirements. 

The Commission identified the six goals as the foundation for transforming mental health care in America. This report discusses each goal in-depth, showcasing model programs to illustrate the goal in practice and providing specific recommendations needed to transform the mental health system in America.

Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify different types of principals across the U.S. The authors analyzed the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey as it presents a unique opportunity to study the different types of U.S. principals since it contains leadership measures not found in other national surveys or administrations. A final sample of 7,650 public schools and principals were included in the analysis.

In order to ensure the Department's “Equity in IDEA” or “significant disproportionality” regulations effectively address significant disproportionality, the Department proposes to postpone the compliance date by two years, from July 1, 2018, to July 1, 2020

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.

This analysis of the state ESSA plans focused on three questions: (1) Are states keeping student learning front and center?; (2) Do school ratings reflect how school are doing for all groups of students?; (3) Is the state being honest about which school need to take steps to improve for one or more student groups? This paper examines each issue in detail, highlighting examples of how different states are addressing the problem. 

Data from the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress are used to compare the performance of New Jersey public school children with those from other participating states. The comparisons are made with the raw means scores and after standardizing all state scores to a common (National U.S.) demographic mixture. It is argued that for most plausible questions about the performance of public schools the standardized scores are more useful.

As suggested by the title, the purpose of this Handbook on Restructuring and Substantial School Improvement is to provide principles for restructuring and substantially improving schools. Sponsored by the US Department of Education, the Center on Innovation & Improvement (CII) engaged leading experts on restructuring and school improvement to prepare modules for this handbook to assist states, districts, and schools in establishing policies.

In this article, we report the results from a randomized evaluation of the Safe and Civil Schools (SCS) model for school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports. Thirty-two elementary schools in a large urban school district were randomly assigned to an initial training cohort or a wait-list control group.

The use of educational data to make decisions and foster improvement is increasing dramatically. Federal and state accountability mandates have created a strong market for formal achievement testing, both in terms of state achievement tests and benchmarking assessments that help predict performance on these tests.

This report synthesizes what research says works in improving teacher skills and knowledge, what nations that outperform the United States in education are doing, and provides an analysis of newly available data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey and other sources to indicate where the nation stands in building the capacity of educators to help students reach high standards. It includes newly analyzed data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey and other data sources.

A prudent way forward for educators given the many acknowledged unknowns in soft skills reform is to substantially enhance efforts that fall within traditional school practices and responsibilities rather than to boldly make risky bets on unproven programs and measures. This paper breakdown the steps for school and district administrators.

We are at the beginning of the transformation of education into an evidence-based field. By evidence-based, I mean an endeavor in which decision makers routinely seek out the best available research and data before adopting programs or practices that will affect significant numbers of students.

This quantitative meta-analysis examines impact of the principal's leadership on student achievement.

Providing alternative routes to teacher certification is an approach to recruit teachers. A definition of alternative teacher certification is provided, followed by a summary of the research on this strategy, state policy examples and considerations for policymakers.

Determining what elementary teacher candidates need to know to effectively teach reading will aid in how preparation programs prepare future teachers. To understand state legislation targeting early reading instruction, this study compared the tenets of structured literacy, the reading method used in dyslexia programs, to scientific reading instruction.

The Council’s mission is to promote the cause of urban schools and to advocate for inner-city students through legislation, research and media relations.

The Education Digest is monthly publication that scans hundreds of publications so it can select the most critical, most newsworthy articles. They are then condensed for quick reading.

The National Council on Teacher Quality works to achieve fundamental changes in the policy and practices of teacher preparation programs, school districts, state governments, and teachers unions.

The Education Commission of the States was created by states in order to track state policy trends, translate academic research, provide unbiased advice and create opportunities for state leaders to learn from one another.