Higher education gets a bad rap these days. The public perception is that there is a growing rift between public universities and the elected officials who support them. In "What's Public about Public Higher Ed?," Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee explore the reality of that supposed divide, offering qualitative and quantitative…

Recent policies intended to improve teacher quality have focused on the preparation that teachers receive before entering the classroom. A short-lived federal rule would have required every state to assess and rank teacher-preparation programs by their graduates' impact on student learning. Though the federal rule was repealed, last year some 21…

In 2010, HCM Strategists received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage academic researchers in identifying and discussing the best currently available ways to account for differences in college "inputs"--students, resources, and fixed characteristics--when evaluating postsecondary outcomes. The project, Context…

The core work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools consists of four stages: identifying practices of highly effective high schools, designing interventions and transfer of practices, evaluating the intervention's implementation and effects, and evaluating implementation at scale. The purpose of this report is to describe the…