The Early Childhood Directors Leadership Institute (ECDLI) project addressed a need for effective professional development with a series of Institutes using the Program Administration Scale (PAS), the Program Management Inventory (PMI), and the Plan-Do-Study-Act model, over a 3-year period. Each of the 100 participating program directors in the…

As the early education coordinator for Prince George's County Public Schools, Judith P. Hoyer recognized the gaps in available services for low-income families. In the 1990s, she created a central location in Adelphi, Maryland, for early childhood services, thus fostering cooperation of governmental and private agencies around the needs of local…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grants program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), aimed to increase the number of high quality early learning and development programs. RTT-ELC awarded $520 million in the first of three rounds of grants to help states…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grants program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, aimed to improve children's access to high quality early learning and development programs. RTT-ELC awarded $520 million in the first of three rounds of grants to help states…

This is the second in a series of policy notes and related publications exploring prospects for developing indicators of teaching quality. The first examined federal databases that include information about teachers, demonstrating that almost none of the measures in these datasets provides indication of teaching quality. This policy note takes the…

The National Coalition on School Diversity has updated this review of federal support for school integration during the tenures of Secretaries Arne Duncan and John King, who both served during the Obama Administration. While much remains to be done, the Obama Administration has made concrete progress on school integration policy. This overview…

The federal government's role in PreK-12 education has long been contentious and continues to evolve. Many have written about education governance, but few have attempted to define an appropriate role for the federal government. That is the core purpose of this essay. The authors articulate a set of principles to guide the federal role in…

This year's joint report highlights the progress made in education since the special session of the 106th General Assembly (2010), which included passage of the First to the Top and Complete College Tennessee Acts. Both Acts provide a framework for collaboration between all state systems of education, addressing the overarching need to produce a…

For the last several years, manufactured crises in Washington have hindered, rather than helped, economic growth and opportunity. Earlier this year, however, Democrats and Republicans came together to produce a 2014 budget that invests in key areas of innovation, education, and infrastructure--investments that will help grow the nation's economy,…

Over the past year, many national leaders have committed to reform education and reshape America's school system. With this goal in mind, the Obama administration created a competitive grant program entitled Race to the Top (RTTT), which was passed by Congress as a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). RTTT features two grant…

Congress's role in defining and promoting equality of educational opportunity has evolved over the past 55 years since "Brown v. Board of Education." Most recently, all three branches of the federal government have focused more on equality of educational opportunity for "individual" students rather than for protected classes.…

This year's "Quality Counts" report, the 15th edition of this annual report produced through the joint efforts of the "Education Week" newsroom and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, arrives at a time of continued fiscal anxiety and education policy ferment in the wake of what has been widely described as the…