One year after the COVID-19 pandemic forced state and school leaders across the nation and around the world to immediately close school buildings, the lasting impact on students is increasingly evident: Months of online learning and limited in-person interaction with educators, coaches and mentors have led to gaps in learning, and unknown…

With Massachusetts' school closure extending until the end of the 2019-20 academic year, Pioneer Institute urges that Massachusetts schools offer meaningful online and virtual learning programs, doing everything possible to eliminate problematic inconsistencies across Bay State school districts. Pioneer further urges Massachusetts to develop and…

This study investigates how instructors consider resource cost and availability when compiling assignments in their course syllabi. It uses the academic planning model from Lattuca and Stark to frame the influences on instructional material selection. It employs a critical incident technique method, asking instructors to take into account one…

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Adult and Community Learning Services Unit and UPD Consulting engaged in a multiyear partnership to provide adult education providers across the state with people-centered, action-oriented training opportunities focused on antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI). This…

Effective teachers can have a significant impact on student success; unfortunately, low-income students, students of color, English learners, and students with disabilities are more likely to be assigned to unqualified, less experienced, and less effective teachers. Inequitable access to effective educators is one contributing factor that…

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) grants states more authority over their school accountability systems than did No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Hence, states have an opportunity to design improved school rating systems. Three of the most important improvements that states can make are to ensure that their accountability systems: (1)…

On April 3, 2017, sixteen states (Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Vermont) and the District of Columbia submitted their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) state accountability plans to either the US Department of…

"Improving Education Together" offers a step-by-step guide to Labor-Management-Community (LMC) collaboration, an intervention that has successfully improved student outcomes in a wide variety of school districts across the country. The authors illustrate how a culture of collaboration between labor, management, and community stakeholders…

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…

The Children's Center for Communication/Beverly School for the Deaf (CCCBSD) follows a theme-based learning model, providing a quarterly theme around which teachers base cross-curricular instruction. The themes are intentionally broad to encourage teachers to create instructional units that integrate academic and functional learning in response to…

Teacher teams focused on developing collective expertise in high-leverage, equity-promoting practices can chip away at low expectations, racism, and cultural biases that marginalize special education students, English language learners, students of color, and other at-risk students. With appropriate professional learning on formative assessment,…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an opportunity for states and local education agencies (LEAs) to rethink the goals and policies that they have in place for public education. Under the new law, education leaders have greater flexibility to define student success and to design their own systems and programs to ensure educational…

The squeeze for time to plan lessons and complete other administrative tasks shapes a school's professional environment and, ultimately, affects the quality of instruction. As teachers are largely separate from other educators during instruction, lack of time for collaboration can be very isolating. More than half of lower secondary school…

The recommendations in this brief create a framework for using data effectively to make instructional decisions. The availability of student-level data for educators has pushed forward the movement to strengthen the role of data to guide instruction and improve student learning. While improvements in technology and assessments, as well as recent…

This publication outlines the fundamental principles and process of Strategic School Design. Through more than a decade of research and practice in the area of school resource use, we have found that high-performing schools are responding to the changing context in education by using people, time, technology, and money in ways that look…