Despite the myriad of challenges that families, students, teachers and policymakers faced in 2021, the momentum to transform education did not waver. New opportunities for students unfolded in more than a dozen states through expanded private and public school choice. An additional 1.7 million students gained eligibility for private choice alone,…

Over the years, most states and districts have focused professional development on teachers rather than principals. However, evidence suggests that principals can play an important role in reaching our national goals of high achievement for all students. School leaders are powerful levers for change--when given the right training and support. But…

"Gerrymandering" is known best as a tool to manipulate boundaries for voting districts, but school districts have long used the same tool to manipulate school boundaries. The author used geospatial techniques--mapping various kinds of demographic data onto school boundaries--to examine public school attendance zones and their effect on…

School districts in Missouri are responsible for public K-12 education and must be accredited to educate children. As a result, there is an evoking interest, demanding attention in Missouri public schools' quality and the students who transfer from unaccredited, critically low-performing schools to accredited, significantly better-performing…

A full year of progress in advancing education reform across America is documented in each of the Foundation for Excellence in Education's Annual Reports. This report presents the broad range of initiatives that the Foundation for Excellence in Education is working on--policies that personalize the learning experience for students, that challenge…

A dual transfer program was created in 1983 in the St. Louis metropolitan area following a 1972 lawsuit brought upon the city, charging it with withholding an equal educational opportunity for Black students. Through this program, Black students from St. Louis City are provided with free transportation to one of 15 suburban school districts, and…

This report provides a new resource for understanding the state of urban public schools in the U.S. Geared specifically toward city leaders who want to evaluate how well traditional district and charter schools are serving all their city's children and how their schools compare to those in other cities, the report measures outcomes for all public…

White females and members of minority groups have historically been underrepresented in educational administration. This paper describes findings of a study that produced a demographic profile of school leaders in central Missouri. A survey of 117 school districts in central Missouri elicited a response rate of 100 percent. Findings indicate that…

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…

One of the current goals of public education is technology integration. This is witnessed in current educational literature, by the enormous sums of money schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) spend to purchase equipment and in the emphasis on weaving technology into the fabric of the educational curriculum. As the integration…

This paper examines the effects of spending variations among Missouri school districts on educational opportunity and quality. In an analysis of six matched pairs of Missouri school districts, each higher spending district was compared with a lower spending district of similar size. Data were derived from document analysis and interviews with the…