Innovation in education is vital for responding to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and for building progress on longstanding challenges in schools. The infusion of substantial, highly flexible pots of federal relief dollars created an opportunity to pilot new programs and initiatives. Many states and districts opted to invest…

The Great Recession was one of the sharpest economic downturns of the past century, with significant impacts across the U.S. labor market. Over past decades, one key feature of the U.S. labor market has been the high and stable returns to education. In this paper I estimate the returns to education for large samples of young workers in Arkansas…

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…

This report, the first in the series, points out that, while urban families increasingly have access to a variety of school options--including charter schools--many rural families have just a single school option. There are numerous examples of rural charter schools that have done great things for students while also benefiting the larger…

America's Promise's ReadyNation initiative has released this brief, which "makes the case" to business leaders on why investing in early childhood should be important to them. The brief includes "how-to" tips, helpful statistics and more.

Building on its previous work examining education and the economy, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), with generous support from State Farm[R], analyzed the economies of all fifty states and the District of Columbia to determine the economic benefits that states could see by improving high school graduation rates. Using a…

Efforts to enhance college going rates have employed a number of strategies, such as improving recruitment efforts and enhancing financial aid packages. Little effort, however, has been directed at looking at the social and human capital that might impact a residential community, and the subsequent influence this community might have on a…

In 2010, unprecedented levels of resources began to flow through state education agencies (SEAs) to support dramatic change in persistently low-performing schools under the expanded federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The challenge for states is to leverage the federal investment to drive dramatic and sustainable change efforts in…

This is the first in a series of briefs examining the progress in raising high school graduation rates over the past decade. During this period, the prevailing belief has been that all students who wanted to or needed to graduate did so. However, it is now recognized that in every state there are too many communities and schools where high school…