There is a growing call to reconsider current approaches to national and state assessment system policies and practices. State and local education agency leaders, educators, community leaders, and advocates have voiced concerns that current state assessment systems--defined primarily by end-of-year multiple-choice tests--are unable to meet…

Health care is one of the economy's biggest industries, so it is natural that the health care industry should play some role in the teaching of introductory economics. There are many ways that health care can appear in such a context: in the teaching of microeconomics, as a macroeconomic issue, to learn about social welfare, and even to learn how…

State policy leaders have an opportunity to take leadership in protecting students--and especially student veterans--from being targeted by predatory colleges. Given failings by the federal government to police for-profit colleges and to ensure basic rights for students to attend college without being defrauded, it now falls to the states to step…

For the past decade and a half, the fight to improve America's schools has been fought largely on two fronts: academic standards as one battleground, and accountability the other, with the issue of mandatory testing adding heat to a very public--and increasingly politicized--debate. The questions for policymakers and educators are as direct as…

Despite advances in improving CCR for students with disabilities, a great deal of work is needed to help more students achieve their full potential. The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA) provides states with flexibility over the design of their educational systems and offers additional provisions to support CCR for all students, including…

Turning around persistently low-performing K-12 schools and districts has been an elusive goal despite prioritization at the highest levels of government. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Education encouraged states to adopt tiered accountability systems, like the Massachusetts model, which allows state takeover of districts in cases of…

The "Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965" ("ESEA") is the nation's key policy driver for elementary and secondary education, shaping federal, state and district efforts to promote effective school systems and improve educational outcomes, particularly for students in high-poverty schools. The most recent…

This report describes the use of Lead Turnaround Partners (LTPs) in the current School Improvement Grant (SIG) program and provides the results of document review, surveys, and interviews with eight State Education Agencies and seven Lead Turnaround Partner organizations. The study focuses on the implementation of the transformation and turnaround…

This document presents a summary of the report, "How Eight State Education Agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region Identify and Support Low-Performing Schools and Districts." This larger report describes and analyzes how eight state education agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New…

This report describes and analyzes how eight state education agencies in the Northeast and Islands Region (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, and Vermont) identify and support low-performing schools and districts under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Data collection for the report…

This special issue of the newsletter of the Adult Education Interest Section (AEIS) of the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), prepared in cooperation with TESOL's refugee concerns interest section, concerns the response of the English-as-a-Second-Language teaching profession to Immigration and Naturalization Service…

The "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" examines what is arguably the single most powerful authority over the teaching profession: state government. This Massachusetts edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ's) "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" is the first of what will be an annual look at the status of state…

This document comprises a collection of conference papers that provide a broad understanding of the problem of homelessness, highlight innovative local and state responses, and uncover key intergovernmental issues that must be addressed in order to improve public and private action. The conference was attended by more than 100 federal, state, and…