Teachers need comprehensive support to improve students' literacy. This Policy Update shares how state boards of education can provide this holistic support to improve through: (1) better teacher preparation standards in early literacy; (2) professional development guidance; (3) high-quality literacy coaches and other support professionals; 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),…

The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

Randomized experiments are often considered the strongest designs to study the impact of educational interventions. Perhaps the most prevalent class of designs used in large scale education experiments is the cluster randomized design in which entire schools are assigned to treatments. In cluster randomized trials (CRTs) that assign schools to…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to recognizing effective teaching. The project's goal is to help build fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and feedback to help teachers improve and administrators make better personnel decisions.…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a rapidly expanding network of public charter schools whose mission is to improve the education of low-income children. As of the 2012-2013 school year, 125 KIPP schools are in operation in 20 different states and the District of Columbia (DC). Ultimately, KIPP's goal is to prepare students to enroll and…

Focusing on student proficiency in reading and math from 2003-04 to 2006-07, this report compares gaps in performance on state achievement tests between grade 8 American Indian and Alaska Native students and all other grade 8 students in 26 states serving large populations of American Indian and Alaska Native students. In response to a request by…

In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to measuring effective teaching. The goal of the MET project is to improve the quality of information about teaching effectiveness available to education professionals within states and districts--information that…