This is the fourth biennial report to Congress on the implementation of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act's" Title III State Formula Grant Program (also known as the English Language Acquisition State Grants Program). This report provides information reported by states to the U.S. Department of Education regarding services…

For more than a century, school boards have endeavored to govern America's schools and school systems. Collectively, the nation's nearly 14,000 school boards are responsible for the well-being of 52 million children, the expenditure of $600 billion per year, and the supervision of six million employees. Despite the magnitude of this…

When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated statistics that do not give an overview of the field. That changed this month, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences unveiled the prototype of its long-awaited Humanities Indicators…

For several years Portuguese higher education institutions have been waiting for the legislation framework necessary for the implementation of the Bologna process. Such legislation was passed quite recently (2006) and has resulted in an unexpected flood of proposals presented at very short notice by higher education institutions to the Ministry.…

This study examines the integration of immigrants via their satisfaction with life in the new country. While most studies on immigrant integration have focused on objective integration parameters such as education, occupation and salary (e.g., Borjas in "Friends or strangers: the impact of immigrants on the US economy." Basic Books, New…

The Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), conducted under the aegis of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), was designed to inform policy and practice in mathematics teacher education. For educational policymakers, TEDS-M contributes data on institutional arrangements that…

There is a growing consensus that teacher evaluation in the United States is fundamentally broken. Few would argue that a system that tells 98 percent of teachers they are "satisfactory" benefits anyone--including teachers. The nation's collective failure to invest in high-quality professional feedback to teachers is inconsistent with…

Research has long been clear that teachers matter more to student learning than any other in-school factor. Improving the quality of teaching is critical to student success. Yet only recently have many states and districts begun to take seriously the importance of evaluating teacher performance and providing teachers with the feedback they need to…

No one has a bigger stake in teaching effectiveness than students. Nor are there any better experts on how teaching is experienced by its intended beneficiaries. Only recently have many policymakers and practitioners come to recognize that--when asked the right questions, in the right ways--students can be an important source of information on the…

This paper offers unique rankings of the extent to which fiscal structures of U.S. states contribute to economic growth. The rankings are novel in two key respects: They are well grounded in established growth theory, in which the effect of taxes depends both on the level of taxes and on the composition of expenditures; and they are derived from…

Community schools are one of the most efficient and effective strategies to improve outcomes for students as well as families and communities. Community schools leverage public and private investments by generating additional financial resources from partners and other sources. This report looks at how community schools finance their work. It…

The Early Childhood Educator Survey and the Early Childhood Administrator Survey allow users to collect consistent data on the use of child assessments and learning standards in early childhood learning settings. Each survey includes modules on educator/administrator background information, assessment use, and learning standards implementation.…

This is the third paper published by The Centre for Literacy in its Working Papers in Literacy series, which presents fresh perspectives on literacy-related issues. The topics are relevant both to other researchers, to practitioners in the field, and to policy-makers. This paper examines the behaviours and beliefs of a group of volunteer tutors to…

For over 25 years, independent researchers have warned of an impending shortage of the special education (SE) faculty who staff the nation's institutions of higher education (IHEs). "The 2001 Faculty Shortage Study" (Smith, Pion, Tyler, Sindelar, & Rosenberg, 2001), which documented the imbalance between the supply of and demand for SE leadership…

Annual "Profiles" reports are comprehensive digests of data on education management organizations. Analysis and interpretation of the data in this report are, for the most part, limited to describing general trends over time. The report is intended for a broad audience. Policymakers, educators, school district officials, and school board…