An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…

A growing number of states are interested in tracking the readiness of children entering kindergarten. In 2010, just seven states (Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, and Vermont) collected Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) data for the purposes of aggregating data at the state level. Since this time, most states report…

Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRISs) commonly offer on-site technical assistance (TA) and coaching to help early care and education settings achieve quality improvements and a higher QRIS rating. In surveys of administrators overseeing statewide QRISs, almost all states reported the use of on-site TA and coaching in both center-based and…

Reflecting the growing momentum in support of quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) as a key strategy to improve early care and education quality, significant amounts of public dollars have been devoted to their development and implementation. In this brief, the authors report on their investigation of both quality rating and improvement…

Quality Rating Systems (QRS) are currently operating, under development, or being piloted in over 25 states or local areas. As the QRS model becomes integrated into the landscape of child care and education service delivery, policy, and the decisions parents make about child care across the United States, there is an increasing need for…

Team members of Project DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice) spent almost two years immersing themselves in the daily work of twenty campuses. The common denominator of these institutions is that they all have participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and have scored better than predicted across some or all of…

This book identifies factors, structures, and procedures contributing to effective statewide coordination and governance of public colleges and universities. The heart of the book consists of descriptions of representative structures in 4 states, where interviews were conducted with 114 individuals--legislators, gubernatorial staff, system heads,…