In 2019, the U.S. Department of Education (Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued their first Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan. Through the plan, OIG affirmed and advanced their long-standing commitment to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce and workplace environment to help ensure that the work they produce is…

This brief provides an overview of five strategies used for persistently underperforming schools that demand significant changes to how schools are organized. It draws upon published research, as well as the experiences of cities pursuing different types of improvement strategies. None of the five strategies offer a surefire way to improve…

In November 2015, the National Policy Board for Educational Administration--a coalition of nine professional associations--adopted the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), a set of guidelines for the training, certification, hiring, evaluation, and supervision of school principals and superintendents. While it draws heavily from…

In November 2022, Florida governor Ronald DeSantis, won reelection by a decisive margin and the Republican party gained supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. During the governor's first term and after reelection, the Florida House and Senate passed legislation and the DeSantis administration took executive actions that further…

Decisions in student affairs often require the integration of multiple knowledge bases (O'Brien, 2018). Although learning and development have historically been core values of the profession (Evans & Reason, 2001), legal demands on student affairs professionals have grown with increasing responsibility for compliance in areas like Title IX and…

Advanced Competition Simulations (ACS), a massive multiplayer online (MMO) strategy gaming company, has petabytes of customer data at their data center in Brentwood, Tennessee that could assist executives with decision making, but they currently do not have business intelligence software or a business intelligence and analytics (BIA) team. As is…

In this brief, the perspectives of special education administrators from Massachusetts and Indiana, who have been engaged in college-based transition services (CBTS), are shared. It summarizes the conversations they had during a fall 2019 Think College webinar and a follow-up discussion in summer 2020. Each administrator has had extensive…

The primary purpose of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC®) is to measure the everyday English skills of individuals, who speak a first language other than English, working in an international environment (ETS, 2015a, 2016a; Powers & Powers, 2015). The TOEIC also has six secondary purposes: (1) to verify the current…

This paper focuses on the potential of competency assessment to support the long-term growth of the labour market by facilitating the appropriate employment of skilled immigrants. A competency-informed approach involves looking holistically at an individual's ability to apply knowledge and skills with appropriate judgment in a defined setting. The…

Tennessee was one of the 10 states selected to participate in New Skills for Youth (NSFY). NSFY, launched by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in 2016, is a $75 million, five-year initiative, aimed at strengthening and expanding high-quality career pathways for youth. As part of this initiative, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Advance CTE and…

How do students believe employers use social media in vetting job candidates? In this instructional experiment, students evaluated three hypothetical job candidates who had divergent social media presences. Questionable content, even if through an indirect link, was thought to reflect on a candidate's character and was extrapolated to future work…

The Committee for Economic Development (CED) believes the nation must focus on effective pathways to help students from all backgrounds and educational attainments successfully transition to careers as members of a skilled US workforce. To further that goal, this report looks at three tools to better serve those students whose initial entry into…

The Texas Education Agency offers grants for districts to implement school turnaround strategies at low-performing schools. Districts that receive these grants can implement a school turnaround strategy (referred to as a district-managed restart strategy) that includes replacing principals and teachers at schools that the district identifies as…

At one time, finding an assistant principal for a public school in Denver entailed a search through "a gajillion résumés," in the words of one local school district administrator. Even then, some ideal candidates likely fell through the cracks. Those days are over, owing to the development by Denver Public Schools of a "leader…

In this article, I provide answers to the questions posed by Will Shadish about the history and development of the Schmidt-Hunter methods of meta-analysis. In the 1970s, I headed a research program on personnel selection at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM). After our research showed that validity studies have low statistical power, OPM…