It has been three years since Race to the Top grant-winning states piloted new teacher evaluation systems and many of them have made considerable progress, yet according to media coverage and a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in April 2015, struggles remain and most grantees have asked to extend the timetables for…

The "Race to the Top" competitive grant program initiated a wave of teacher evaluation reform, which scholars and policymakers have long identified as critical to improving teacher quality and student performance. State boards of education (SBEs) and state education agencies (SEAs) took different approaches to these reforms, and as a…

On November 5, 2002, Congress passed the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), establishing the Institute of Education Sciences (IES, or the Institute) and its board of directors, the National Board for Education Sciences (NBES, or the Board). The Institute reports to Congress yearly on the condition of education in the United States. The…

Methodology: There is no national source of data or information on the federal role in funding and oversight for public PK-12 school facilities. To address this shortcoming, 21st Century School Fund has prepared this study with the support of the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities. In collecting data and information for this report,…

This article summarizes the findings of the National Research Council (NRC) report "On Evaluating Curricular Effectiveness" and examines the reviews in middle grades mathematics undertaken by the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). The NRC report reviewed and assessed 147 key evaluations of 13 National Science Foundation-supported K-12 mathematics…

After nearly two years in development, a new federally backed research service on "what works" in education began rolling its first products off the assembly line. Launched with $18.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the newly operational What Works Clearinghouse is the department's electronic version of a "Consumer…

Beginners in many disciplines learn that correlation never proves causation, but sometimes, even in public health, correlation, mistaken for causation, becomes the basis for policy and great expenditures of public and private money. "True experiments" with random assignment to experimental and control groups hold a special place in the…

Work-based education (WBE), including traditional vocational education and other career-focused programs, was an important curricular component in American schools for most of the 20th century. The 1990s was a period of substantial change for work-based education (WBE). Spurred on by a concern about the international competitiveness of the…