This brief is part of a four-part series examining the past, present, and future of modern school accountability systems. With the dual forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national call to action on racial inequity, the question of how we should measure and hold schools accountable for the impact they have on students is more urgent than ever.…

In the last several years a good deal of public discourse was devoted to describing the effects that more than two decades of education reforms, the last iteration of which was known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), has had on teaching and learning. It is widely argued that coupling teacher evaluations with students' test scores, enforced…

For more than 25 years, the Public School Forum of North Carolina has isolated local spending from state and federal spending to examine the capacity and actual effort of counties to support public schools. The annual Local School Finance Study examines not only on the amount that counties spend on schools, but also each county's investment in the…

Reforms of the size and scale to which Race to the Top States have committed, require unprecedented planning, oversight and problem solving to implement. Although many factors influence the outcomes of these reform efforts, performance management is a key structural element in realizing "sustainable reforms" that are durable and…

Research across the decades has confirmed that effective school leadership is associated with better outcomes for students and schools. A high-quality school leader affects dozens of teachers and hundreds or thousands of students. It is a pivotal role. From 2011 to 2016, The Wallace Foundation, through its Principal Pipeline Initiative (PPI),…

This article focuses on contemporary federal education policy as it manifests in rural schools. Rural schools differ appreciably from nonrural schools in terms of organizational systems, structures, and culture. Federal policies that drive school improvement initiatives (e.g., those regulating the functioning of schools and those managing the…

The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a…

The main goal of this social policy report is to propose a holistic approach for promoting developmental success among Latinx children and youth. This report highlights the need to 1) redefine success and 2) account for intersectional inequalities. First, the current demographic landscape of Latinx students is presented to showcase the variability…

This brief case study shows how one State--Delaware--identified priority goals and reforms and plans to sustain them. The case study outlines Delaware's involvement in the Reform Support Network (RSN) Sustainability Work Group and three sustainability lessons learned by the State Education Agency (SEA): focus on what works, establish proof points…

Reforms of the size and scale to which Race to the Top States have committed, require unprecedented planning, oversight and problem solving to implement. Although many factors influence the outcomes of these reform efforts, performance management is a key structural element in realizing "sustainable reforms" that are durable and…

Federal laws and funding initiatives, such as the No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top campaign, have created an increasing incentive for schools nationwide to document student progress, standardize assessment practices, and evaluate teachers according to student success. In response, the Common Core State Standards, a popular yet…

With increasing frequency, U.S. presidents have orchestrated relations between federal and state governments. A defining feature of this "executive federalism" is a pragmatic willingness to both borrow from and reconstitute very different types of past federalisms. A case in point is President Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RttT)…

Improving low-achieving schools is a critical challenge facing urban education. Recent national policy shifts have pressed states to take an expanded role in school improvement efforts. In 2009, a federal grant competition called Race to the Top (RttT) compelled states to improve their capacity to implement ambitious education reform agendas.…

All states value their distinct approaches to policy and to life and the U.S. Constitution embeds the idea of state rights and responsibilities as a core principle in the federal system. California arguably takes this further than most. This paper provides a new way to think about how national policies might complicate or augment the next state…

This study sought to understand the opportunities and challenges associated with the implementation of state designed Race to the Top (RttT) funded reform networks. Drawing on a conceptual framework developed from the networked governance literature, we analyzed the 12 state RttT grantees' applications. Our analysis revealed that states designed…