Tennessee has gained national recognition for its comprehensive strategy to increase college attainment. This report describes the development and expansion of Tennessee's completion agenda through a set of related and interlocking policies designed to produce a statewide culture of college completion, as well as the evolution of Tennessee's…

Public School educational leaders from around the United States are confronted with choices in how to invest resources that can create the greatest impact for students. An often-overlooked area of investment is early childhood education. As defined by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), this is the period of…

This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

The enrollment at specialized schools for the deaf, with dormitories, is declining all around the country. A plethora of challenges serve as catalysts for this decline. If schools cannot have a thriving student population, they may cease to function in their academic capacity, thus losing access to Deaf culture and a highly qualified deaf…

The "statewide system of support," a feature of Congress's 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provided an organizational framework for a "managerial" approach to school improvement that was accelerated in No Child Left Behind (2001). When Congress temporarily flooded states with economic…

Administrators of adult education programs work in dynamic and ever-changing environments. They are continually challenged with a myriad of issues related to programming, budgeting, marketing, strategic planning, funding, human resource management, and other topics. With decades of real-world experience in the field, Steven Schmidt and Susan…

Many school educators struggle to reconcile the onslaught of mandatory and competing, top-down policies. Educators must merge policies into a singular plan that reflects the local stakeholders' goals and values. Given the federal and state accountability movement, schools are forced to build capacity around the use of on-site data and research…

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…

Higher education in Louisiana faces the consequences of a decade of disinvestment, radically reducing state support for colleges and universities and disproportionately shifting the funding burden to students and their parents. The consequences of this defunding hobbled the public institutions for a generation, just as excessive student debt…

This study examines the education policies and education sector strategic plans of Somaliland. For this purpose, qualitative research was adopted and data were collected from reviewing education policies, education sector strategic plans, the joint review of the education sector analysis reports, and the curriculum frameworks of Somaliland.…

The New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED) was faced with ensuring its local education agencies (LEAs)--comprising 89 school districts and 100 charter schools--had sufficient support to effectively use American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to meet students' most pressing needs. NMPED turned to the Region 13 Comprehensive Center (R13CC) in 2021…

The global landscape of higher education is an uneven field where players like nation-states are placed in hierarchical and centre-periphery relations. This paper focuses on the global field of international student mobility (ISM) and investigates China's place in the field using an analytical framework consisting of three key categories of…

The transition of a college or university president is inevitable. Presidential tenure is becoming shorter and turnover becoming more commonplace at private and public higher educational institutions. Thriving higher education institutions rely on effective leadership to navigate critical areas such as enrollment, financial health, and…

Following the passage of the Strengthening Career and Technical Education Act for the 21st Century (Perkins V) in the summer of 2018, state education leaders are crafting four-year plans to implement the law, which are due to the U.S. Department of Education next spring. They ought to take full advantage of the flexibilities Perkins V has to…

As a vital part of the educational enterprise, plans must be made to define the future we want to create for tomorrow's child and to enable educators to deliver on the promise. Planning is just a substitute for good luck. Not relying on luck, educators must identify valid and valuable measurable objectives for education and then enable educators…