The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, signaled a major shift in the roles of states and districts in supporting school improvement. Under ESSA, state education agencies (SEAs) and local education agencies (LEAs) have more responsibility and flexibility in developing and implementing plans, informed by local context, to support the…

There is a pervasive and ongoing perception that leadership preparation is a problem. Important questions remain about the intentions, capacity, and impact of state departments of education engaged in leadership preparation program redesign. In this essay, I take up several issues concerning this state policy work, including whether a one size…

The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the states that have designed strong history standards and note what has made them exceptional so other states might do the same. They include Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina. The report draws on interviews with individuals from each state who sat on…

Response to Intervention has garnered recent interest from policymakers, researchers, and educators. Studies of its effectiveness have found it promising, and state education agencies are increasingly interested in the approach. This report supplies basic information about state planning and implementation of the approach in Alabama, Florida,…

This report presents current expenditures for public elementary and secondary education for school year 2003-04 (or fiscal year 2004). This data is from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD), National Public Education Financial Survey (NPEFS) and School District Finance Survey (F-33). The data for these…

This study examined the coverage of sexual orientation topics within 77 public university secondary teacher preparation programs across seven US states, and represented programs preparing 8,300-11,500 teachers annually. Findings indicated that 40% of programs did not address sexual orientation as a diversity topic. Further, even programs that did…

This report, submitted to the Alabama legislature, is the result of an evaluation by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education of the budgets submitted by the state's senior public institutions of higher education and by its Chancellor of the Community, Junior, and Technical Colleges. At its meeting of December 11, 1998, the Commission made…

The major purpose of Project CAUSE (Collaborative for Alabama Urban School Educators) as explained in section I of this report was to get educators in the Birmingham and Mobile school systems, in the Alabama State Department of Education, and in the Appalachia Educational Laboratory to (1) collaborate in identifying and solving problems; and (2)…