There are nearly 1 million credentials in the United States that students and workers can take advantage of, but how information about these credentials is collected and communicated is oftentimes inconsistent and hard to access. In February, we invited a group of postsecondary and workforce development experts to consider how policymakers can…

Monitoring chronic absence by grade, student populations, school, district, and geography is crucial to learning recovery and addressing the inequities exacerbated by the pandemic. Chronic absence and other types of attendance data can help identify where more engagement and support are needed as well as illuminate policies and practices that are…

The book analyses and evaluates several key community college reform programs that emerged after the Recession of 2008 and as a result of major initiatives in California, New York, Tennessee, Florida, Connecticut and Wisconsin. Because of the economic downturn in the early 21st Century, an already eroding financial base for public higher education…

Childrens' learning has been massively disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing the need for more opportunities for differentiated, high-quality learning, stronger relationships with the adults in their school, and streamlined access to social-emotional support -- especially for the country's lowest-income students, Black and Latinx students,…

During the 2015-16 school year, about one in seven students was chronically absent, missing at least 10 percent of school days. An early warning sign of academic risk and school dropout, chronic absence predicts school failure more reliably than test scores. To understand the drivers of chronic absence, state boards of education should examine…

Despite major changes to teacher evaluation since 2009, scant research examines how principals enact these policies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 44 principals in 13 Connecticut districts, we use structure-agency theory to characterize how principals improvised when implementing the state evaluation model. We find that principals' use of…

A master plan in higher education is developed to address the academic and workforce needs of a particular state. The master plan helps serve as the roadmap for implementation of proposed strategies to reach state goals in education and degree attainment. In Tennessee, Drive to 55 is a state-wide effort to increase the number of Tennesseans with a…

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) grants states more authority over their school accountability systems than did No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Hence, states have an opportunity to design improved school rating systems. Three of the most important improvements that states can make are to ensure that their accountability systems: (1)…

Despite the myriad of challenges that families, students, teachers and policymakers faced in 2021, the momentum to transform education did not waver. New opportunities for students unfolded in more than a dozen states through expanded private and public school choice. An additional 1.7 million students gained eligibility for private choice alone,…

On April 3, 2017, sixteen states (Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Vermont) and the District of Columbia submitted their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) state accountability plans to either the US Department of…

The achievement gap separating economically disadvantaged students from their more advantaged peers disproportionately affects students of color and has been the focus of discussion, research and controversy for more than 40 years. While the gap between black and white students narrowed considerably from the 1950s to the 1980s, that gap has…

Schools and education in general have made an implicit and, we would assert, explicit promise to society to educate all the children in their care. Unfortunately, there are achievement gaps that illustrate how schools have broken this promise. Teacher evaluation and other accountability measures have been heralded as the answer to this problem.…

The link between health and learning is clear: healthy, active and well-nourished children are more likely to attend school, be ready to learn and stay engaged in class. Yet far too many students--particularly low income students and students of color--spend their days in buildings with unhealthy air, have limited opportunities for physical…

Trustees face complex choices related to costs and efficiency as they navigate new accountability policies, financial headwinds, and a changing global marketplace for college education. The latest release in a series of trustee guides from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's Institute for Effective Governance, "Bold Leadership, Real…

This 22nd edition of "Quality Counts" offers a fresh take on the annual top-to-bottom ranking of the nation's school systems on a state-by-state basis published by "Education Week". The first of three "Quality Counts" reports being rolled out over the course of the year, "Grading the States" aims to…