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),…

Several hundred of the nation's lowest-performing schools have recently undergone major changes in leadership and teaching staff to comply with federal requirements for using school improvement grants (SIGs) financed by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). In particular, schools that receive stimulus-funded SIG awards must…

This latest brief updates education leaders on the key policies the 13 (Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia) Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states plan to implement under federal waivers to No Child Left Behind. It details,…

The federal "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB) legislation required school districts to ensure that all teachers of core academic subjects met the requirements to be designated highly qualified by July 1, 2006. However, because no Maryland counties were able to comply with the 100 percent highly qualified designation by July 1,…

School Improvement Grants (SIGs) financed through the economic stimulus package are intended to spur dramatic change in persistently low-performing schools. Many state and local officials charged with implementing SIGs view the creation of a safe, orderly, collegial, and productive school climate as an essential step in raising student…

Research has long suggested that significantly increasing quality time in school for teaching and learning can have a positive impact on student achievement. Recognizing this connection, federal guidance requires low-performing schools to increase student learning time if they are implementing two popular reform models using school improvement…

With the focus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on struggling schools and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) on the horizon, now is the time to have an honest conversation about what people know--and don't know--about school-level trends. To spur this conversation and to help state and local…

Baltimore's school-based vision-screening program may be leaving thousands of children with uncorrected eyesight problems. Vision screening in public schools is essential for students to learn, especially when low-income children face a high rate of eyesight problems and have poor access to health care. Left undetected and uncorrected, vision…

When it comes to educational challenges, the nation's 12.1 million Hispanic schoolchildren face plenty: language, poverty, lower-than-average graduation rates for high school and college, and, more recently, a wave of laws targeting illegal immigrants that has made school seem like less of a safe haven for Hispanic students in some states. Yet, as…

Two schools in Maryland received ARRA SIG (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act School Improvement Grants) funds to enable them to implement their turnaround efforts. This paper describes the outcomes of these two ARRA SIG recipient schools: (1) G. James Gholson Middle School; and (2) Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School. The experiences of…

For more than 10 years, the education community has watched the corporate ups and downs of Edison Schools Inc., the New York City company that has created controversy with its aim of making money from public schools. Long a target of those wary of such aims, the now privately held Edison made headlines with its four-year run as a public company,…

This paper is one of four individual case study reports presenting the qualitative findings from a five-year investigation of the impact of accountability reform on students with disabilities in four states, eight districts, and twenty schools. This case study report presents qualitative data collected over a four-year period--2001-2004--from…

The law establishing Maryland's program of full State funding of public school construction costs became effective as of July 1, 1971. This report describes the beginnings of the program, traces its development, and attempts to appraise its effectiveness. In preparing the report, the author reviewed minutes of the various agencies and committees…