When the COVID-19 pandemic drove schools online in March 2020, state education leaders were left without access to data needed to understand how best to support students. The pandemic revealed the strengths and limitations of state education data systems while inspiring new strategies for collecting, reporting and using data. In 2021, DataSmith…

This white paper presents a selection of model schools who all have, to some degree, fostered deeper learning. Schools were selected by internet search, or through references in "deeper learning" reports and documents. It should be noted that information in these reviews is based on information from school web-sites, in some cases the…

This Special Issues Brief from the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR Center) and the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center) outlines essential features for providing high-quality, structured, and sequenced opportunities to practice within teacher preparation programs. This brief is…

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…

Amid the cacophony of special interests fighting to be heard in statehouses and on Capitol Hill, a cadre of current and former chief state school officers is elbowing its way into the nation's education debate at a time when states are taking more control of K-12 education. A little more than a year old, Chiefs for Change is an invitation-only…

This project examines how eight state education agencies engaged the charge of improving their lowest-performing schools. The states examined are among the most active and intentional in this regard. In many ways, they are at the leading edge of what could eventually become 50 different experiments in performance management. By focusing on states…

The National School Climate Center (NSCC) completed a 50-state policy scan on state school climate and anti-bullying policies to better understand the current state policy infrastructure supporting the development of positive school climates. This policy brief examines the current status of school climate and anti-bullying policies in each state,…

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is working to respond to increased interest in the use of growth models for school accountability. Growth models are based on tracking change in individual student achievement scores over multiple years. While growth models have been used for decades in academic research and program evaluation, a…

Locally controlled public schools are one of the cornerstones of our nation's democracy, yet many schools are not preparing students for success. Far too many students are not graduating, and many of those who do graduate are woefully unprepared for college or a meaningful career. Successfully initiating and sustaining meaningful improvements in…

A research project investigated the dissemination practices of nine State education agencies (SEA) in order to identify useful techniques which could be adopted by other groups seeking to implement change. Interviewers conducted site visits in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania; local…

Materials collected in this book and in Volume I (SP 003 238) are related to the Multi-State Teacher Education Project (M-STEP). They deal with program experiments and resulting directions, including guide-line type materials resulting from the project effort and items prepared by other sources as project-centered aids. Part I, "A Forward…

Online learning holds promise for providing new educational opportunities to a wide range of students across the country. The rapid expansion of K-12 online learning, however, threatens to outpace the development of appropriate state-level policies that serve to fulfill the promise. As the National Association of State Boards of Education warned…

A study sought to determine the extent to which local accountability systems exist in vocational education and to describe the nature of the underlying relationships between such programs and their constituents. Data were collected through interviews from two local vocational education programs in each of five states (California, Florida,…

Materials collected in this book and in Volume II (SP 003 239) are outgrowths of the Multi-State Teacher Education Project (M-STEP), a 3-year program to strengthen the capacity of state departments of education in the development of joint responsibility between local education agencies and teacher education institutions with emphasis on laboratory…