Purpose: Our purpose was to gather and evaluate accurate, up-to-date information on physical education (PE) policy implementation across multiple U.S. states and regions. Methods: A U.S. Physical Education and Physical Activity Policy questionnaire was developed and completed by 4,845 public-school PE teachers from 25 U.S. states. The U.S.…

This report presents school-level finance data on expenditures by function from the School-Level Finance Survey (SLFS). The SLFS is an extension of two existing collections being conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in collaboration with the Census Bureau: the School District Finance Survey (F-33) and the state-level…

The Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS) was a research and development effort by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to explore the possibility of developing an administrative records survey that would compile compensation and demographic data on all public school teachers in the nation. A pilot survey in 2007 collected data from…

A survey was conducted with 86 teachers across 10 states regarding their students' ease of use of physical manipulatives incorporated with implementing evidence-based early numeracy instruction. The majority of respondents indicated significant student accessibility barriers. Specifically, 75% of respondents had students with tactile defensiveness…

The profession of teaching is inherently stressful. Resilience, or the ability to adapt and develop competence despite exposure to disruptive change, has been shown to be beneficial for teachers. The purpose of this study was to determine if personal resilience is a predictor of professional development engagement and career satisfaction of…

This article describes a comprehensive strategy for developing a larger corps of effective principals, "The Principal Pipeline Initiative," launched by the Wallace Foundation in 2011. Its purpose is working to strengthen school leadership by documenting and evaluating leadership development in six urban districts (Charlotte-Mecklenburg…

Denver Public Schools, one of 14 districts that receive funding from The Wallace Foundation to improve principal effectiveness, is also one of a number of districts around the country emphasizing the development of principals' managers in the central office. The principal's job has changed over the last decade, going from a role that revolved…

It has been projected that by 2020 one out of three children will be from a culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) background. Rapid changes in school demographics and student needs are already presenting new challenges to school-based service-delivery methods and there have been calls for increased professional development efforts to better…

As state tests of student achievement are used for an increasingly wide array of high- and low-stakes purposes, evaluating their instructional sensitivity is essential. This article uses data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Project to examine the instructional sensitivity of 4 states' mathematics and English…

The Core to College initiative aims to facilitate greater coordination between K-12 and postsecondary education systems around implementation of the Common Core State Standards and aligned assessments. Core to College grants have been awarded to teams in Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon,…

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…

Scaling of evidence-based practices in education has received extensive discussion but little empirical evaluation. We present here a descriptive summary of the experience from seven states with a history of implementing and scaling School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) over the past decade. Each state has been…

The third in a series of reports evaluating a multi-year Wallace initiative documents ways in which six districts are working to improve school leadership districtwide. It describes several new measures districts are implementing, including systematic support for assistant principals; the use of performance standards to hire and evaluate…

Research has long been clear that teachers matter more to student learning than any other in-school factor. Improving the quality of teaching is critical to student success. Yet only recently have many states and districts begun to take seriously the importance of evaluating teacher performance and providing teachers with the feedback they need to…

This quantitative study investigated the relationship between teacher dispositions, subject content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and reasons that school principals recommend non-renewal of teachers' contracts. Nearly 2,000 school principals in 13 states completed an emailed survey. In deciding whether to non-renew a teacher contract,…